The architecture of sound
Can the solid world of architecture provide insights into the intangible world of music?
The poet Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe once described architecture as ‘petrified music’. This has echoed down the years, albeit with a small modification to ‘architecture is frozen music’. The poet expressed the idea during a series of conversations with the younger writer Johann Eckermann and, in doing so, touched on an idea that many instinctively gravitated towards. Although Goethe was only referring to a shared ‘tone of mind’ produced by music and architecture, the poetic conjunction itself hinted at a deeper connection.
"I have found a paper of mine among some others," said Goethe to-day, "in which I call architecture 'petrified music.’ Really there is something in this; the tone of mind produced by architecture approaches the effect of music.”
One similarity between architecture and music is the common reliance on materials. Just as wood, glass, stone, and metal possess certain characteristics, orchestral instruments are categorised by material, e.g., woodwinds, brass, strings, and voices. An instrument’s materials facilitate and constrain possibilities: certain notes, phrases, and techniques that are possible on one instrument can be impossible on another.
Such ideas might lead one to question whether the solid world of architecture can provide insights into the intangible world of music.
The material nature of architecture was a subject of great interest to the influential 19th-century English art and architecture critic John Ruskin. He was concerned about how modern materials would influence architectural forms and believed that the emphasis on rationalism during the Renaissance had corrupted its architecture, resulting in an excessively symmetrical, rational, and mathematical style. By contrast, he advocated the Gothic style and its celebration of its materiality, as well as its humane and imperfectly hand-carved ornamentation.
Scholar John D. Rosenberg described in his book, The Darkening Glass, Ruskin’s fear that modern metals would rupture the fundamental relationship between material and form.
The very freedoms afforded by these materials convinced Ruskin that they would yield unnatural or ugly forms. He believed that a building should harmonise with the contours of its environment. But the strength and malleability of metals would enable the architect to deny his dependence upon nature by concealing the relationship between the structural problems he encountered and the forms he created to solve them.
In music, the separation of material and form, which Ruskin wrote about in the 19th century, arrived in the 20th century with electronic, digital, and algorithmic music. These developments rapidly eroded the limitations previously dictated by acoustic instruments and human performers, in a manner reminiscent of how modern metals released architecture from certain material constraints.
For some musicians, this represented an almost metaphysical liberation, for others a violent disembodiment and mechanisation of sound. These reactions often signalled more than just musical aesthetics but expressed an underlying desire for a certain kind of society or existence. This was certainly the case with Ruskin, who lived in Britain during the brutal upheavals of the Industrial Revolution, which provoked intense reactions from artists and critics alike.
Ruskin’s hostility to the new building techniques and materials was in part hostility to industrialism itself. Railroads, steamships, or exhibition halls displaying boilers and lathes not only appeared ugly in themselves, but symbolized the mechanization which threatened to substitute in the daily life of the worker the pulsing of the machine for the rhythm of nature. The very irregularities of the Gothic facade, with its materials quarried from the earth rather than forged in the furnace, its ornament carved by hand rather than stamped by machine, represented for Ruskin the only natural and humane form of building.
Ruskin could be puritanical, but some of his concerns appear vindicated. Putting aside certain styles of brutalism — which have genuine aesthetic and philosophical foundations — it is impossible to ignore how many cities across the world are now filled with impersonal, banal, and repetitive architecture created by developers who disregard the citizens who have to live inside and alongside them.
Something similar can be observed in music, as AI companies like Suno and Udio build systems that facilitate the instant generation of derivative and formulaic music. This music — often referred to as ‘slop’ — is gradually flooding into digital and physical spaces, blurring the line between machine and human creation. For anyone who believes in the power of music to shape our internal and external world, this should represent a cause for distress.
In architecture, fears about modern materials were in some ways allayed by one of Ruskin’s greatest acolytes, the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Like Ruskin, Wright believed that form in architecture should be nature-influenced and organic, and referred to his work as ‘Organic Architecture’.
True FORM is always organic in character. It is really nature-pattern.
To quote scholar John D. Rosenberg again, he describes how this term was used in a poetic and deliberately vague manner.
Defining precisely what Ruskin meant by “Organic Form” is as difficult as defining what Wright means by “Organic Architecture.” They are not so much terms as philosophies, attitudes toward existence itself, symbols of an inner sense that the life and forms of nature ought to suggest the life and forms of art, indeed shape the structure of society itself.
Though Wright adopted Ruskin’s nature-influenced aesthetics, he expressed them through the materials that disturbed Ruskin: reinforced concrete, steel, and large glass panes. These materials were not used sparingly but were quintessential to Wright’s style.
The fact that Wright’s buildings are sympathetic to their surroundings and expressive of the natural world somewhat undermines Ruskin’s fears, indicating that the problem is not so much the materials, but an inability or unwillingness to use them with skill and imagination. In modern music, the same concern is being raised now. Namely that digital and algorithmic influences will increasingly corrupt and disembody music, tipping it towards mechanisation and soullessness.
Recently, writer and musician Ted Gioia published a series of provocative and interesting articles echoing Ruskin’s romantic rebellion, though Gioia focuses on the digital, not Industrial Revolution. He believes that musical rhythm and mathematics are broadly unrelated and has expressed a desire for a ‘war against algorithms and technocratic manipulation’. In this and similar pieces by other authors, the word algorithm takes on an almost pejorative quality. In one passage, Gioia writes.
Back in the 1700s, ruthless algorithms had a different name. They called them Rationalism—and the whole Western world was under the sway of the Age of Reason. But like today’s algorithms, the new systems of the Rationalists attempted to replace human wisdom and experience with intrusive and inflexible operating rules.
Like many who are distressed with the current state of the world, Gioia longs for a radical change in music and society, but he sees this change coming about through new romanticism. He is not alone, as author Ross Barkan writes in The Guardian.
The new romanticism has arrived, butting up against and even outright rejecting the empiricism that reigned for a significant chunk of this century. Backlash is bubbling against tech’s dominance of everyday life, particularly the godlike algorithms – their true calculus still proprietary – that rule all of digital existence.
Many artists, including myself, might naturally sympathise with a movement that prioritises people over machines, seeks inspiration in nature, and desires to re-enchant a digitally desiccated world. However, new romanticism seems to imply escapism. Rather than grappling with the complexities of a hi-tech society, there seems to be an urge to turn the clock backwards. In practice, dropping out means leaving the design of advanced technologies to others
In architecture, algorithmic artistry can be found throughout history, with few better examples than Wright’s contemporary Spanish-Catalan architect, Antoni Gaudí. His unique architectural methods helped plant the seeds for modern algorithmic design.
Gaudí was famously influenced by nature, with his most renowned building, La Sagrada Familia, widely regarded as a profound expression of natural design. The American architecture critic Paul Goldberger described it as ‘the most extraordinary personal interpretation of Gothic architecture since the Middle Ages’.
To help in his work, Gaudí designed some of his buildings using inverted polyfunicular models that employed interconnected systems of chains and weights to achieve a dynamic and malleable method of design, resulting in what some regard as a form of analogue computing and an early form of parametric design, a technique that uses computer algorithms to create structures through a dynamic process of adjusting parameters. Parametric design helps create organic-like forms that would be difficult or impossible to generate through other means.
There is a rich history of similar forms of algorithm design, with Islamic architecture’s spellbinding art, the elegance of Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes, and the use of lightweight forms by German architect and structural engineer Frei Paul Otto representing examples of great architectural beauty.
Could the innovative aesthetics of organic architecture created by systems and algorithms be a source of influence for a movement within digital music? This is currently not a popular idea, with the majority of digital instruments designed with angular euclidean geometry rather than the shapes and sounds of the natural world. Though I have no principled objection to this aesthetics — which can be used to good effect — the lack of a significant alternative feels limiting.
To grasp this idea fully, it is useful to look at traditional angular aesthetics in sound. The graph below represents a popular method of modelling a sound’s amplitude (attack - decay - sustain - release or ADSR). The vertical axis represents amplitude and the horizontal represents time.
At a glance, it looks artificial. There are no sounds in nature that resemble it, just as there are no plants, rocks, or mountains shaped like it. Yet there is nothing about digital sound that makes it immutably angular, it simply reflects the predominant aesthetic of modern times.
ADSR was partially inspired by our understanding of how instruments create sounds. The sounds start with an attack, a period where it gains amplitude, followed by a decay where it loses amplitude, and a sustain period where the amplitude remains steady, finalising with a release where the amplitude fades to silence. But just as Wright, Gaudí, and Fuller went beyond traditional uses of materials and re-imagined how buildings could be created, so could music re-imagine digital sound and instruments to find new ways of creating music.
In the 1980s computer scientist Ken Perlin invented an algorithm that made visual effects look more organic and natural. He did this after working on the computer-animated film Tron, where he experienced frustration with the ‘machine-like’ CGI film effects of that time. The graph below is a visual representation of Perlin noise. It shows a curving line generated by a Perlin noise algorithm, modulating in a manner that resembles a river from a bird’s eye view, which contrasts with the angularity of the ADSR example.
Perlin Noise can be used in sound, for example, as a source for modulating the frequency spectrum of white noise — a hissing sound traditionally found when scanning between radio stations. The audio below is the result of three white noise generators having their high frequencies filtered by three Perlin Noise modulators.
The result is figurative. It sounds like the sea. The modulations, governed by Perlin Noise, produce wave and wind-like sounds. It is not exactly music, but it could be developed into something musical. This simple experiment helps to demonstrate that algorithms can create organic sounds just as they can create organic architectural forms.
So, can architecture guide how we create sounds and music? Architecture, having successfully retained its expressivity beyond the Industrial Revolution, offers inspiration for a path for music as it undergoes the Digital Revolution. Buildings such as Fallingwater and La Sagrada Familia demonstrate that neither new materials nor modern processes dictate form, but rather, the skills and intentions of the artist.
New romanticism seems to provide little space for the idea that algorithms or systems could be vehicles for deep and personal artistic expression. Rather, it taps into a cynicism that, while in many respects seems quite justified, also leads to nowhere. Setting the romantic against the analytical, the mind against the heart, or tradition against modernity presumes that these should oppose and not complement.
Nature embodies such dualities, with the organic forms that Ruskin and Wright admired having emerged from a universe governed by laws of physics that are mathematical, constant, and symmetrical. Instead of attempting to triumph over a perceived opposition, perhaps the goal should be to balance such forces. Incorporation rather than conflict can act in the service of a philosophy that allows such dualities.
The dualistic mind seemingly has a preference for knowing things by comparison… Wisdom, however, is always holding the “rational” and the “romantic” together. Richard Rohr
Rather than trying to escape from the algorithms that rob us of our autonomy, perhaps we should create and shape new ones in ways that allow us to explore what it means to be human and to provide us with deeper insights into the universe we inhabit. Systems, algorithms, and modern technologies are a part of the human experience, and as with nature, embodiment, and love, they belong in art if expressed with skill and motivated by generosity.
Instructive and thought provoking as usual, Dom. Not that I know a lot about it, but I wonder how fractal geometry would fit into this paradigm that seeks a third way in order to reconcile the dichotomy between mind and heart in music that uses digital means of composition. Also, the mp4 (if that's what it is) of white noise filtered by Perlin noise modulators also sound like a very windly spring night in North Texas.
Another analogy with the straight lines of modernism is the rigid locking-to-pitch in pop vocals of the last twenty years. I remember one of Adam Neely's Q&A sessions where a viewer asked if Adele was singing microtonally at a certain part of one of her songs. The answer was no - she was just using pitch inflection as an expressive device.