Visualizing Acoustic Space
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 6047945 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Gascia Ouzounian (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2008 |
| Volume | 17 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 45-56 |
| Publication date | 2008-02-28 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Circuit Musiques contemporaines (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1183-1693 • E-ISSN: 1488-9692 |
| Publisher | Consortium Erudit (PUBLISHER • CA) |
| DOI | 10.7202/017589ar |
| OpenAlex | W2149022270 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 6 |
This article explores concepts of acoustic space in postwar media studies, architecture, and spatial music composition. A common link between these areas was the characterization of acoustic space as indeterminate, chaotic, and sensual, a category defined in opposition to a definite, ordered, and rationalized visual space. These conceptual polarities were vividly evoked in an iconic sound-and-light installation, the Philips Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World Fair. Designed by Le Corbusier, the Philips Pavilion also featured a black-and-white film, color projections, hanging sculptures, and Edgard Varèse’s Poème électronique, a spatial composition distributed over hundreds of loudspeakers and multiple sound routes. Typically remembered as a sequence of abstract sound geometries, the author argues that Poème électronique was instead an allegorical work that told a “story of all humankind.” This narrative was expressed through a series of conceptual binaries that juxtaposed such categories as primitive/enlightened, female/male, racialized/white, and sensual/ rational– contrasts that were framed within the larger dialectic between acoustic and visual space
Acoustic space · Acoustics · Art · Dialectic · Epistemology · Linguistics · Literature · Loudspeaker · Movie theater · Narrative · Pavilion · Physics · Politics · Visual arts · Art, Politics, and Modernism · French Literature and Poetry · History · Philosophy · Visual Culture and Art Theory
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0.67 |
| Citation span | 2023 - 2025 (3) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |