Composition

The act of composing for a specific acoustic presents a plethora of challenges, mainly the intention of the acoustic regarding your musical material. Examples of this ideology are events from early places of worship where the buildings were designed to carry the voice and homophonic passages a far distance, allowing the sound to swell. Other examples include the technique of ‘cori spezzati’ or divided chorus in St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice Italy. Here, the design of the basilica mimics that of a Greek cross with balconies providing performance space for the choir. With the audience sitting in the middle, composition techniques allowed the singers to move the sound around the room in a way which had not been experienced before, providing an early version of an immersive surround sound experience.

“Performing in a large building, shopping mall, concert hall or parking lot is an entirely different acoustic experience to performing the same music in a small room or domestic setting. So why do we expect one piece to be flexible enough to cope with such a wide array of performance venues?” - Ambrose Field, 2016

The RT-60 of an acoustic can lay the groundwork for rhythm and tempo of a piece, using the time it takes for the acoustic to fade you can create “a perceivable unity between the rhythmic flow of small-scale cells, sections, and larger formal units”.

Next an analysis of an impulse response can help to identify harmonic content and suggest timings or density of notes to fit the space. In the first Architexture piece in 2012 singers commented that they felt ‘liberated: the acoustic clarity that was generated through appropriately spacing out the notes through time was very welcome, allowing them to concentrate on articulation and diction.’