This is a book about sound studios, focusing on their architectural and geographical aspects. It explores how music is materialized under specific spatial and technological conditions and the myths associated with this process. Through ten in-depth studies, it examines the design, evolution and current function of sound studios amidst economic and technological shifts in the music industry. Traditional studios are in flux between the past and future. The industry, while steeped in romanticism and nostalgia, also embraces forward-driven pragmatism and an extensive reuse culture, encompassing heritage audio, building materials and existing buildings. A surprisingly diverse architectural heritage, the most significant feature is the host building, the framework around the studio capsule. Many traditional studios adapt to digitalization with hybrid solutions, reflecting a shift toward smaller, more versatile spaces. In a time when recordings in theory can happen anywhere, destination studios must excel to attract clients, balancing historical legacies with diversification. Although they may be easy to deconstruct, many of the myths endure, sustaining ideas of landmark recordings, unique locations and distinct remnants of sonic heritage. Courtesy of their capacity to keep the past alive in the present, traditional sound studios are best described as museums that work. This book aims to reach scholars and students with an interest in history, theory and preservation, as well as practicing architects and architectural students who wish to find out more about the relationship between sound and space, acoustic design and retrofitting of historical buildings into specialized functions. It also aims to reach practicing musicians, producers, music students and music scholars.

Build first-class recording studios and listening spaces Design and build your own audiophile-grade recording and playback environments using proven, cost-effective plans and techniques. Handbook of Sound Studio Construction: Rooms for Recording and Listening explains practical acoustical properties and describes how to engineer acoustically sensitive spaces, including music recording studios, control rooms, voice studios, home project studios, A/V suites, media rooms, and surround-sound home theaters. Learn how to choose room dimensions, select building materials, construct your own custom treatments, maximize isolation, and generate and analyze response curves. This do-it-yourself guide incorporates decades of roomdesign experience and provides you with the practical knowledge to design and build your own acoustical spaces or improve existing spaces. Coverage includes: An introduction to room acoustics and acoustical design Reflecting, absorbing, and diffusing materials Room geometry, modes, and treatment Acoustic isolation, site selection, and HVAC design Wall, floor, and ceiling construction Window and door design considerations Reverberation times, early reflections, and psychoacoustics Objective and subjective room evaluation Plans and specifications for 10 recording and listening rooms

Traffic, music, language and nature help to create unique soundscapes that are essential to the place-based character of each city. Taking into account both the urban soundscape and the impacts of sound on the urban dweller, this book examines sound not as a by-product of urban life, but as a fundamental part of the urban experience that is crucial to understanding the city ́s sense of place. Illustrated by case studies from Europe and North America, these range from on-site measurements to the construction of audio tours for local tourism, from media analysis of popular culture audio drama to sound-identity and city branding, and from the classification of noise in city planning to a consideration of the complex relationship between sacred sound and the creation of a sense of place. Taking a social geographic perspective, the book focuses on the effects of sounds on the individual and how they influence the ways s/he engages the city as place, especially in their daily routines. In doing so, it uncovers the socio-scientific potential of sound in the urban environment, based on the understanding that sound cannot and must not be seen as detached from the urban landscape, but rather as a constituting element. Sound exists not only ’within the city’: it ’is’ the city.

While we are used to looking around us, we are less used to listening to what happens around us. And yet, the noises we produce reveal our way of life, and learning to master them is a necessity. This book aims at drawing the reader’s attention to the sound of the urban environment. The topic is by its very nature complex, as it involves sounds and noises, urban space and social activities. Using an interdisciplinary approach, it examines a heterogeneous selection of experimentations from the domains of music, art and architecture. Significant case studies of pieces of music, public art works and scientific research in the field of urban planning are analyzed, investigating the methods that have been adopted and the aural processes that have been generated. It then uses the findings to reconstruct the underlying theories and practices and to show what might be drawn from these procedures applied to urban planning. The overall objective is to learn to build and enrich space with sound, arguing that there is a need to reconsider architecture and urban planning beyond building, and to look to the world of the arts and other disciplines. In doing so, the book guides the reader toward a sensorial architecture, and more generally toward consciously creating environmental architecture which is sustainable and connects with art and which diffuses a culture of sound.

This thesis develops a relational geography perspective on creative work and practice, with a specific focus on the recording studio sector. Drawing on an extensive social network analysis, a questionnaire survey, and nineteen semi-structured interviews with recording studio engineers and producers in London (UK), the thesis reveals how recording studios are constituted by a number of types of relations. Firstly, studios are spaces that involve a material and technological relationality between studio workers and varied means of production. Studios are material and technological spaces that influence and shape human actions and social inter-actions. Secondly, studios are sites of relationality between social actors, including engineers, musicians and artists. The thesis reveals how the ability to construct and maintain social relations, and perform emotional labour , is of particular importance to the management of the creative process of producing and recording music, and to building the individual social capital of studio workers. Finally, the thesis argues that studios are sites of changing employment relations between studio workers and studio as employer. In the recording studio sector, a complex and changing set of employment practices have re-defined the relationship between employee and employer and resulted in a set of employment relations characterised by constant employment uncertainty for freelance studio workers. It is argued that the three types of relations revealed in this thesis, manifest at a multiplicity of geographical scales, construct recording studios as distinctive social and economic creative spaces. In conclusion, it is argued that a relational perspective is central to progressing geographical accounts of creative work and of project-based industries in general.

This volume reveals the extent to which aural perception influences our spatial awareness. Spanning various fields and practices, from psychology to geography, and from zoology to urban planning, it covers a range of environments in which sounds contribute to forming our sense of space and place. The contributions gathered here lead from the mother’s womb, through the habitats of insects and owls, to the resonating bodies of buildings and the city, to artistic endeavours that aim to consciously reveal the spatiality of sound. In this progression, the book demonstrates the profoundly constitutive role of hearing and listening at all stages of our biological and social development, as well as the epistemological, phenomenological and emotional importance of sound in relation to our construction of space. As such, it will appeal not only to architects, town-planners and artists, but also to the growing community of scientists and scholars intrigued by sonic issues. Differing from both quantitative acoustics and sound design, its approach opens new perspectives on the sonic dimension and aural understanding of our environment by tracing analogies between a diversity of spaces formed when sound interacts with listening as a mode of attention.