“Sound Houses”

This chapter looks at the relationship of music and architecture, both historically and with regard to the “spatial” and “acoustic” turns in recent cultural thinking. The author suggests that during the twentieth century sound art offered a distinctive challenge to the formalizing tendencies of both modernist music and modernist architecture. Architecture is instead understood in its multi-sensory materiality, while the sonic is understood as an intrinsic property of architectural experience. Similarly, space is understood as an intrinsic property of music, while much recent musical practice is shown to have recognized the inextricable association of sound and space. Examining the work of sound artists alongside the spatially conceived music of composers, this chapter considers the spatial and acoustic turns of the later twentieth century as a means for thinking about the postmodern sonic as a field that challenges the old modernist aspiration of both music and architecture to aesthetic autonomy.