"the room flatters the music"

David Byrne offers this new TED talk about how performance spaces shape and influence music. 

From the sustained, slow notes of choir music in big reverberant cathedrals to the sharp percussive quality of Talking Heads music in CBGB’s, it’s a wonderful review of that rarely discussed musical dialogue between humans and their physical world. Design trends wind up changing sound and new sounds encourage new ideas about physical space. That said, most young people are never encouraged to listen to different rooms and spaces and develop notions of reflection, reverberation and the like, even though they can affect physical health, attention and emotional well being. People go in droves to big amplified concerts in hangar-like buildings designed for sports, which as Byrne says is a dreadful environment for music. They come home with their inner ears ringing and fail to recognize it as the major injury and self-inflicted abuse that it is. And we take amplification for granted when we go to "a show," even though the right music made in the right room with only the instruments and musicians driving the air has an emotional effect that can’t be achieved with cone drivers and electromagnetism. Thus the enduring allure of acoustic music in amplified times. 

Comments

[driver49]

Flash. Why does it have to be Flash? Now I gotta get out my LAPTOP!