The sonic atmosphere as a historical object?

Olivier Balaÿ (1, 2)

1 CRESSON - Centre de recherche sur l'espace sonore et l'environnement urbain
2 AAU - Ambiances architecturales et urbaines

There would be an absence, a gap in the description of the sound living environment of the past. How can we manufacture the history of the spread and production of an atmosphere, its materiality? The man, who is never passive in his world, can identify his landmarks and create his own arrangements with architectural forms, machines and techniques he meets. He is sensitive to the atmosphere surrounding him and that he makes back, to the modes of communication that are invented, to exchanges, frictions and chills that are emerging. Now the making of the "atmosphere" escapes to the historical strategies and resists to the getting caught of the rules of the description, or even to the approach of the perceptions in situ, those that are corresponding to the heart of the experience. To find how an acoustic atmosphere is recognized by those who make it, we question the volume of air spaces, their auditory matters; then we explain how those streams flow through the air; at last we ask how they spread and are received. Those informations exist in the archives, although they are few, even if we look for them carefully.

Domains: Acoustics [physics.class-ph]; Acoustics [physics.class-ph]

Olivier Balaÿ. The sonic atmosphere as a historical object?. Acoustics 2012, Apr 2012, Nantes, France. ⟨hal-00810612⟩