In Place of Sound

In early June 2006, a group of over one hundred artists and researchers met for a three-day conference in the Architecture Building at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada, to discuss from as many different viewpoints as possible the varying relationships between sound and space. This conference was part of soundaXis, a city-wide festival involving most of Toronto s new music community and organised by the Toronto Coalition of New Music Presenters. Out of the lively discussions at this conference, two primary themes emerged: the fraught condition of the relationship between sound as space, and the problematic role of representation and its twin, translation, in any discussion of this relationship. This book presents thirteen essays taken from the conference which address one, or both, of these primary themes. In addition, seven graphic essays have been included which present projects in which architects explicitly take on sound as a generating material in their designs. The resulting chapters in the book provide a diverse and, hopefully, provocative collection of ideas and images. They are meant not so much as a comprehensive study of the sound|space nexus such a study may not actually be possible but as a place to begin the discussion.

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