Atmospheric Architectures

Introduction

A theory of music worth retrieving, in the light of developments in modern music since Schönberg, lies in our archives of cultural history. It is part of the teachings of philosopher and mystic Jakob Böhme (1575–1624) and contained in his text De Signatura Rerum (1651). Here, Böhme conceptualizes things (or, more precisely, all of Being) along the model of a musical instrument. The body is regarded as a sounding board, and its form and materiality as tuning or character (Stimmung, called signatura by Böhme), which is accountable for the characteristic expression a thing can have. The essence, essentia, resting inside the thing needs excitation to appear. For that, Böhme holds God responsible in the greater scheme of things. In individual cases, however, this excitement can come from another thing, or from a human being who blows to make a thing sound.

Crucially, in Böhme’s theory of understanding, we understand an utterance when it strikes our inner bell. That means that understanding is a co-vibration, a resonance. Thus, what we call interaction is for Böhme a phenomenon of resonance. Things affect each other not via pressure and thrust, as they would for Descartes later, but through communication. The coherence of the world appears to Böhme as a grand concert. Might music, as we call it, be a part of this grand concert, or might it even be our way of participating in this concert?

Modern art and the aesthetics of atmospheres

Since the onset of aesthetic modernism, that is, roughly since Baudelaire’s times, a constant race has taken place between artistic development and aesthetic theory. It was not only in visual arts that avant-garde developments transcended, again and again, what art was supposed to be – the same applies to music. Musique concrete and sound installations, in particular, forced a revision of the theory of music. Beyond that, they quite generally changed fundamental aesthetic concepts. To mention some key words in advance, these changes concern the diversification of sound material, a new conception of music as a spatial art, the priority of hearing,1 and the return of the voice.

Aesthetics was conceived by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten in the middle of the eighteenth century, initially as a theory of sensible cognition. Too quickly, however, it turned into a theory of taste concerned only with works of art. In Kant, aesthetics still seemed essentially an aesthetics of nature;² in Hegel, though, the latter was already no more than a vestibule for aesthetics proper, that is, for the theory of the work of art. Henceforth, aesthetics was primarily to serve aesthetic judgement and thereby art criticism, completely abandoning the field of sensible experience and affective concern. As a consequence, aesthetics has shown itself incapable of grasping developments in modern art after Schönberg und Duchamp. This becomes quite clear in Adorno’s aesthetics, which hovers on the threshold, as it were: Adorno was unable to recognize or else acknowledge the artistic character of jazz.

Since then, a new aesthetics has developed, which has the concept of atmosphere as its core. An aesthetic of atmospheres offers the extraordinary advantage of taking up a wide range of everyday experiences. It allows us to communicate easily about phenomena like a serene valley, an oppressive thundery atmosphere, or the tense atmosphere of a meeting. The notion that atmospheres are moods that are in the air designates a phenomenon everyone is familiar with. Furthermore, we have at our disposal an almost inexhaustible fund of expressions to speak about or to characterize atmospheres. One talks of a serious atmosphere, a threatening atmosphere, a sublime atmosphere; but one also speaks of an atmosphere of violence or of sacredness; one even speaks of the atmosphere of a boudoir, of a petty-bourgeois atmosphere, or of the atmosphere of the 1920s.

Building on these everyday experiences and phrases, the term atmosphere has meanwhile been developed into a scientific concept. What is particular about it, but what is also theoretically difficult, is that it designates a typical phenomenon of the in-between. Atmospheres are something between subject and object: one might call them quasi-objective feelings that are indeterminately diffused in space. However, insofar as they are nothing without a perceiving subject, they also have to be called subjective. Their value lies, precisely, in this in-between state, bringing together what was traditionally separated into the aesthetics of production and the aesthetics of reception. One can indeed produce atmospheres, and there are elaborate art forms specifically devoted to this task that involve quite objective, technical means – not as causal factors, though, but as generators of atmospheres. Paradigmatic for this approach to atmospheres is the art of scenography. On the other hand, atmospheres are experienced in a mode of affective concern; one has to expose oneself to them in bodily presence, feeling them in one’s own disposition, to be able to identify their character. This is a classical aspect of the aesthetics of reception.

Both contrastive and ingressive experiences are appropriate to study atmospheres: the specificity of atmospheres is best experienced when their characters are offset, that is, before they have already, as part of all that surrounds one evenly, sunken into inconspicuousness. Thus, for example, they are experienced in contrast when one finds oneself in atmospheres diametrically opposed to one’s own mood, or upon entering when changing from one atmosphere to another. Atmospheres are then experienced as impressions (Böhme, 1998a), namely, as a tendency to induce a certain mood.

The aesthetic of production, on the other hand, is interested in the generators of atmospheres. These are objects, their qualities, arrangements, light, sound, and so on. However, what is decisively at stake in thing-ontology in particular are not the qualities pertaining to a thing, which define it and differentiate it from other things, but rather the qualities it radiates outward into space. More precisely, it is about reading qualities as ecstasies,3 as ways in which a thing steps out of itself and modifies the sphere of its presence. The study of ecstasies is particularly relevant for design and scenography, where the objective qualities and functions of things matter less than their scenic value.

The aesthetics of atmospheres, which began as part of ecological aesthetics (Böhme, 1999a), came to rehabilitate Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s original approach of aesthetics as aisthesis, that is, a general theory of perception (Böhme, 2001a). It has meanwhile demonstrated its revelatory potential in a series of case studies, for instance of city atmosphere, light as atmosphere, the atmospheric of dusk, the atmosphere in church spaces, music as atmosphere, and, finally, atmospheres of interpersonal communication.4

The aesthetic conquest of acoustic space

Since ancient Greek times, music as a theory of art has consisted of the knowledge of tones, which were determined by intervals, or their harmonic distance from a basic tone. This understanding of music seems unbelievably narrow to us today. By comparison, the twentieth century introduced a vast expansion of musical material unfolding in many dimensions and amounting almost to a conquest of acoustic space. From tonality via chromatics, the path led to a step-by-step expansion of acoustic material admissible in music, eventually including even pure sound and noise. At first, tonal nuances in the chromatic intervals played a role, together with the emergence and inner life of a tone (blowing, stroking, or plucking); later, the interest shifted to the instruments’ individuality and their voices, and the importance of sound increased. Then, an ironic take on instruments, involving beating and scratching of sound boxes and ever new percussion instruments, admitted a wealth of sounds, no longer just tones, into music. Eventually, recordings of everyday sounds, street scenes, sounds from nature, and the acoustic world of the factory found their way into music making. Today, sampling techniques render all kinds of acoustic material available for compositions.

Apart from this diversification of musical material, there is evidence of a principal change or, better, an expansion of the character of music. Until well into the twentieth century, dogma held music to be a temporal art, which finds its very essence in the temporal coherence of musical processes spanning beyond the present moment. From the basic requirement of cadence and return to the tonic to melody and theme to the structure of movements and to the unity of a symphony: coherently bound succession was considered typical for music. Even in Schönberg’s twelve-tone music, the adoption of fugue technique placed the musical proper into successive unity. This understanding of music was not superseded but certainly put into perspective insofar as music was then discovered as a spatial art and, in new music, more or less explicitly developed as such. The fact that music fills spaces and that space, via resonance and reverberation, represents an essential element of its effect, has always been known. Newly discovered were the spatial shapes, that is, form figures and ensembles in space, of the individual tone, the ensemble of tones, and also the succession of tones (or, better, the succession of sounds). These had never before been an issue for music. Quite likely, contemporary electronic techniques of reproduction and production in music first made this area workable and thereby also drew attention to it. To make a tone buzz through a space like an insect, or perhaps rise above a dully tuned volume of sound to atomize like a firework – these possibilities first arose with contemporary technology. They drew attention to something that, in a certain sense, had always already belonged to music. The Greek terms for high and low (oxys, ὀξύς, and barys, βαρύς, meaning pointed and heavy or broadly set) already hinted in that direction. In new music, however, practitioners began to shape the spatial form of music quite consciously, partly using classical instruments, partly electronic installations. Consequently, they advanced the recognition of space as an essential dimension in the creation of music generally. Under certain conditions, this can become the key dimension of a musical work of art, of which something like a beginning or an end, or a principle of shape operating across time, can then no longer be reasonably expected.

The tendency of music towards spatial art, particularly, has brought it into the realm of an aesthetics of atmospheres. For the spaces that are relevant here cannot simply be identified with geometrical space but with topological space at best. Musical space, of course, has its own directions, and there are shape-like phenomena and something like a mutual externality – all of which, however, should be seen not as separate but as changing, merging, appearing and disappearing forms. Further, this space is affectively experienced; something broadly set, for example, as heavy and oppressive, something rising as soothing and joyful, something shattering as funny, and so forth. Taken together, these aspects show that musical space equates, strictly speaking, to an expanded bodily space; that is, it amounts to an outward sensing into space, formed and articulated by music.

The discovery that music is the foundational atmospheric art has solved an old, always annoying yet irrefutable problem for music theory, namely the question of what the emotional effect of music actually consists. By contrast with the helpless theories of association, or theories deploying phantasy as an intermediate element, the aesthetics of atmospheres can provide the simple answer that music as such is the modification of bodily felt space. Music shapes the listener’s disposition in space, it intervenes directly into one’s bodily economy. Practitioners have made use of this phenomenon long before the theoretical insight arrived: already in silent movies, music bestowed both spatial and emotional depth to the image. Subsequent film music followed this practice. In German, one even speaks of an Atmo in the context of audio drama or radio feature; it is backgrounded to an action through music, or acoustic events more generally, in order to endow the narration with atmosphere. In a similar way, atmospheres are generated in bars through particular sounds, and the wait in airports, subway shafts, a dentist’s clinic, department stores or hotel lobbies, is made pleasant, or cheerful and active, by music.

What applies to atmospheres generally is also an everyday reality for acoustic atmospheres: the character of a space is responsible for the way one feels in that space. Meanwhile, it has been discovered that the sound of a region significantly mediates one’s sense of home; likewise, the characteristic feeling of a life style, or an entire urban or rural atmosphere, is determined essentially by the respective acoustic space. It follows that the notion of a landscape can no longer be restricted to the visible today, and also that town planning, for example, must cease its preoccupation with noise prevention or protection and start concerning itself with the character of acoustic atmospheres of squares, pedestrian zones, and whole cities.

Music and soundscape, or the music of the soundscape

If twentieth-century music expanded acoustic space by diversifying tonal material, including technical sounds, everyday samples and even noise, and if music eventually developed from a temporal to a spatial art that deliberately creates affective spaces, this conquest of space was facilitated by an entirely independent development. By this I mean R. Murray Schafer’s worldwide project Soundscape, founded in the 1970s (2010). Soundscape was concerned with the research and documentation of the world of natural sounds, the acoustic life of a city, or the characters of technology and work. The resulting material was then used for compositions. Acousticians and sound engineers collaborated with musicians, if they were not composers themselves. Seen from the side of music, this was a development towards the diversification of musical material; from the side of Soundscape, it was a discovery of the world’s own musicality. While it was certainly always acknowledged that birds or whales, for example, have their own music, this project was about more. It was about the discovery of acoustic characters or, better, the acoustic form of living environments – be they natural, like the sea, the forest and other landscapes, or lifeworlds in cities and villages. It became evident that condensation and composition were required even for the documentation of such acoustic worlds, to mediate them to those who are not from these regions. What could have been more logical than to make this condensing and composing an explicit form of creativity and, in that way, partially meet with music and partially to join forces with it. John Cage’s composition, Roaratorio is an example of the latter.

The work of Sam Auinger and his various collaborators falls into this area, too. Like nobody else’s, his productions let us participate in the Grand Concert of the world. This is not entirely simple, of course, and contemporary people, whose everyday listening is rather a form of not-listening, might need to pass through music like Auinger’s to discover and appreciate this Grand Concert. Auinger proceeds differently from Cage; for example, he does not produce tone or sound files to use them subsequently for composition by sampling. Rather, the transformation of a given sound occurs in music on site, in actu. Sounds are tuned with the help of a resonating body, usually a resonance tube, that is, they are perceived by the way in which they make a resonating body vibrate, that is, mediated by the natural frequencies of this body. This is a fascinating process, which repeats materially, as it were, something that can be taken as the beginning of music per se, namely, the fact that attunement (i.e., the signatura of the resonating bodies) turns sounds into tones. It is well worthwhile considering, using the experiences provided by Auinger and others, whether our hearing of the grand concert of the world may perhaps consist of such a tuning of sounds that close in on us, a tuning performed by our own ears. Is it not also the case that our vision turns the chaos of optical frequencies in the world into a relatively ordered spectrum of colours?

Of course, tuning does not level all sounds into a series of keynotes and overtones. Some, rather, depending on their amplitude, retain their independent existence. In that way, Auinger and others achieve what the collaborators in the Soundscape project call the difference between tonality and characteristic event. Tonality is the basic mood of a landscape, a city or a port, and the rare and distinguished bundle of sounds making up the physiognomy of a landscape are characteristic events, as it were. Such events may be, as in Auinger’s music, the sounding of pipes, for example, or the sound of the brakes on a train. Important is, again and again, the appearance of the human voice, not in its linguistic articulation, but as an idiom, as the characteristic sound of a language. Auinger does not shy away from using the sound of a classical instrument from time to time either.

Arising from this are pieces, as we might call them, of the grand concert of the world Jakob Böhme talks about; not, of course, as God might hear it, but tuned, calibrated for our ears and thereby turned into music. And yet, we are likely to hear the music differently, too, in the way Auinger and others enable visitors of their installations as listening participants: at the Grand Central Station in New York, in the Haus der Kulturen in Berlin, or, more generally, at an airport, a motorway, a pedestrian zone. Once engaged with it, understanding what one hears there as music, that is, receiving it resonating according to Jakob Böhme, one performs, indeed, yet another reclassification of music: music is the play of acoustic events in a space unfurled by tonality.

Both developments, music in the twentieth century and the Soundscape project, as well as their connections, cannot be considered outside the context of technological development. Just as the unfolding of music as a spatial art is almost unthinkable without electronic technologies of reproduction and production, so is the research into acoustic landscapes without electronic recording and reproduction technologies. Twentieth-century developments in acoustic technology, however, also had another, quite independent effect; namely, the ubiquity of music. Music, which in the European tradition over the last centuries was associated with festivities and special occasions, has become a cheap general consumer good. It is constantly available through radio and television channels and our acoustic environments are usually already occupied by music, or at least infiltrated by it, due to the acoustic furnishing of public spaces. Wherever that is not the case, contemporary humans carry their own acoustic world with them, first on Walkmans, today on MP3-players.5

What does this development imply? While the last aspect above would certainly suggest an acoustic pollution of our environment,⁶ the acoustic awareness of the average person has, on the other hand, undergone a significant expansion. This not only means that the musical needs of a broad sector of the population have been significantly augmented, and with them acoustic expectations, but also that listening as such has become a dimension of many people’s lives and an area of satisfaction. Of course, the noise of contemporary environments and the occupation of public space by music have also led to a general practice of not-listening. Nevertheless, listening has unfolded from an instrumental activity – I hear something – to a way of participating in the life of the world. The aforementioned developments have blurred the boundaries of music. While, at the beginning of European music history, the drawing of such boundaries was central to its definition, the subsequent constant expansion of its field has tended to render all boundaries vague. Thierry de Duve’s comment – in reference to visual arts – also applies to music: after Duchamp, the basic question of aesthetics, What is beautiful? has changed to What is art? (1996).

Acoustic atmospheres

The reference to acoustic atmospheres may have provided a tentative answer to this question. Tentative, because it is an answer that defines the character of musical experience for our time. It is to be expected that different answers will apply in other times after us, even soon after us. What is certain, though, is that the great period of Platonism has come to an end in music. Plato criticized people who tried to find out with their ears what harmonic intervals are (Plato, Ferrari, & Griffith, 2000: 239 [5321a]). And Adorno was still able to say that the appropriate way of hearing a symphony is to read the musical score. How far have we moved since then! It is now questionable whether contemporary music can even still be adequately notated. It seems as though sensibility has been rehabilitated in music and that we have to uphold, contra the whole of the Platonic period, that music can only be grasped by hearing. Perhaps one even has to say that hearing as such is the proper theme of music. It has been said about modern art generally that it is reflexive, and that its topic is art itself, its social position, its anthropological significance, its pure appearance. In visual art, this becoming-reflexive had a clear and demonstrable meaning. Many modern works of art were no longer about the representation of something but about the experience of seeing itself. This may have started already with Turner or the Impressionists, but it becomes utterly clear with artists like Joseph Albers, Barnett Newman, or Mark Rothko. In music, this development may not have become so obvious because music is, in a certain sense, far more natural. By contrast with the image, it has always been clear that music is non-representational, that it does not represent anything. Of course, there was painterly music or programme music. However, these attempts undeniably went astray and tended to put music into the service of something else. Already Kant said once that music is the language of feelings. One could interpret this dictum, of course, to mean, according to the usual semiotic understanding of language, that music designates feelings, that is represents them. However, this is not what Kant meant, for he distinguished in spoken language precisely the tone, in which something is said, from the content mediated by signs, that is, it is the tone which allows one to participate directly in the speaker’s feelings (Kant & Walker, 2007: § 53, p. 157). Music was for him the coming-to-independence of this form of communicating feelings. Today, we have cause to generalize this thought: the crucial factor in music would then be the thematic development of acoustic atmospheres as such. This would provide an entirely different definition for music from what we found in the Platonic tradition, where music was defined essentially by the restrictions placed on the tonal material or, better said, by the restriction of the acoustic space that defines musical tones. Today, we can say that we are looking at music whenever an acoustic event concerns the acoustic atmosphere as such, that is, when it is about hearing as such, not about the hearing of something. This may need more explanation. But in advance, one can already say that music, according to this definition, no longer needs to be exclusively made by humans.

What does it mean to say that it is hearing itself that matters and not hearing something? In posing this question, one first discovers how much hearing normally refers to objects. I hear a car driving past, I hear the bell tolling twelve, I hear someone talk, I hear a mosquito, I hear the horn of a ship. This way of hearing is useful and plausible; it serves us in identifying objects and their location in space. However, in a certain way, hearing itself is overheard in this type of hearing. Granted, one can say I hear the barking of a dog instead of I hear a dog bark. But this refers, in fact, to a different kind of hearing. As a mode of the dog’s presence in space, the barking is certainly part of the dog. However, characteristic of voices, tones, and sounds is that they can be separated from their origins, or detach themselves, and fill space and wander through it almost like things. To perceive acoustic phenomena in this way, that is, to perceive them as such rather than as expressions of something, requires a change in attitudes. Living in the twenty-first century, we have often trained ourselves in changing attitudes precisely by using acoustic devices, particularly by listening with headphones. Many of us find it embarrassing that we were only able to discover in this way that acoustic spaces are something in themselves, independent of things and non-identical with real space. While acoustic space is, of course, also experienced in real space, this experience takes place in bodily felt space, in the space of my own presence that is unfurled by the expanse of bodily sensing. In a hearing that does not skip over tone, voice and sound to reach the objects that may cause them, listeners can sense voice, tone and sound as modifications of the space of their own presence. When listening like this, one is dangerously open, letting oneself enter the vastness outside, and is thus liable to be hit by acoustic events. One can be carried away by sweet melodies, knocked over by thunderclaps, threatened by droning noises, or wounded by a piercing tone. Hearing is being-outside-oneself and, for this very reason, potentially the joyful experience of sensing one’s being in the world, at all.

One has to go through these experiences, they cannot be mediated verbally. Nevertheless, there is a useful analogy: Descartes, a philosopher who basically thought mechanistically in principle, was once asked whether someone who uses a stick to probe a stone actually senses that stone. His answer was, like that of twentieth-century Gestalt psychology, a stone is sensed where it is. This has been called embodypathy (Staemmler, 2007) – not entirely wrongly. Strictly speaking, however, what is involved here is the expansion of bodily felt space. Even more so than about probing with a stick, one can certainly say about hearing that one is outside while hearing. And this being-outside of ours not only meets voices there, and tones and sounds, but it is itself shaped, moved, modelled, nicked, cut, lifted, squeezed, widened and constricted by those voices, tones and sounds.

In the best model of hearing we have so far, people internally participate in what they hear. This resonance model of hearing drew its plausibility from the well-known experience where people sing along internally, as it were, with a melody they hear. But this model suffers from an inadequate topology of inside and outside, and it quickly meets its limits in the face of the complexity and foreignness of all that is heard. After all, it is highly unlikely that someone could internally sing along with the sounds produced by a nacelle, with its whirring, shrilling, whistling and droning. These sounds are also not even heard inside but rather, precisely, outside. It is the bodily felt space itself that starts to resonate, and in which these voices, tones and sounds happen. This experience admittedly occurs only rarely or, better said, only rarely in pure form; for in a certain sense it primes each and every listening experience. Except, the self does not normally lose itself to listening but maintains itself by displacing the voices, tones and sounds towards their origins, thereby skipping over the experience of in-between.

Conclusion

At last, we should once more return to the beginning. Twentieth-century developments in music have turned music itself into a component part of the environment. Functionalized as an aspect of interior architecture (one speaks of acoustic furnishing), it has been reduced to something atmospheric, as it were. On the other hand, both avant-garde music and the Soundscape Project have, from two different flanks, even promoted acoustic atmosphere as the essence of music. Thus, the voices of things and the concert of the world have attracted increasing attention, and listening has gained in importance for life. Taken together, these facts imply that, in the area of acoustics, ecological aesthetics is not only a complement to natural science ecology but, rather, that it has its own task of producing knowledge about and of preserving and shaping acoustic space. The question concerning the nature of a humane environment is recast as one concerning the characters of acoustic atmospheres. Here, too, it is important to go beyond a purely scientific approach, which can do little more than measure noise in decibels and to ask which acoustic characters the spaces we live in should have.

1The English distinction between hearing and listening has no direct equivalent in German. While, aside from hören (hear), there exist zuhören (listen) and lauschen or horchen (listen intently), the semantic reach of hören overlaps, in practice, partially with that of listening.

²This impression disappears on closer inspection, though, and it becomes apparent that examples from the field of design are particularly relevant. See Böhme (1993b; 1999b).

³Regarding this term, see The Ecstasies of Things, p. 37ff, above.

⁴See ‘The atmosphere of a city’, p. 77ff; ‘Light and space’, p. 143ff; ‘Church atmospheres’, p. 167ff; ‘The grand concert of the world’, p. 123f; and ‘Atmospheres of human communication’, p. 97f.

⁵See the classic text by Shuhei Hosokawa (1984).

⁶A critical response is offered by Hildegard Westerkamp (1988).