10.20.13 | Improvisational Architecture

Improvisational Architecture is a new series of recordings in CD and digital download formats now available from GD Stereo. The series will focus on recordings by artists who’s work challenges the boundaries, rules and definitions of architecture and music.

How can architecture be music? How can the sound of architecture be music? How can architecture sound? When is sound music?

“The plastic arts, although they make use of the sensation of sight, address the eye almost the same way as poetry addresses the ear. Their main purpose is to excite in us the image of an external object of determined form and color.” – Hermann Helmholtz

Perhaps we can pivot on this Helmholtz quote and propose that music can excite in us an atmospheric equivalent to the experience of architecture or the built environment. Transposing the situationist construct of psychogeography to sound results in an expression of architecture as music.

Jocelyn Robert, an artist working with urban performances, “derive” inspired projects, recordings from buildings and soundtracks for cities writes: “sound as a set of physical, political, geographical forces, which, when working in a network, create a situation we call music.”

Cycloides by Jocelyn Robert is the first release in this series of improvisational architecture. The work is a piece for the disklavier. See Cycloïdes for further description.