As I sit in a Belfast coffee shop mulling over the finish of our design module, the comments of my Final Crit as an Undergraduate and slowly editted a final Internal Environment Report for submission I am struck by the cacophony of sound in this space.
I believe this project has heightened my awareness of sound – you know that feeling when you are underwater, or in a plane, and the sounds around you have a muffled effect. That is sometimes how I think of sound. As something that happens, mumbling in the background and making up the fabric of the places around us. Then the pressure balances, or our heads burst out above the water, and we hear everything. Really hear it. We notice the layers, that the cacophony is not a cacophony at all – I looked it up – but a harmonious web of sounds coming together to make up the persona of that place.
A cacophony is defined as a mix of unpleasant loud sounds, a harsh discordant mixture. It is not the melded mix of life, but that word – and we remember words as powerful here – means it is innately unpleasant. A cacophony is something our ears, if they could, would run from. However, I don’t see it as a horrid reality – the mix of sounds seems pleasant, strong, innately beautiful. As one melody overlays another a complex image is created in the sound waves. A life is given to a room with sounds and songs dancing in the space. Is that an overly poetic view? I don’t think so – what is life really without some creative license in it anyway. If you start to see sound as this tapestry of overlaid melodies it is interesting to dissect the make-up of different spaces.
So I bring you back to the coffee shop – here I sit, alone at a wooden table on a wooden seat against a wooden floor with my Mac, a notebook, pencilcase, and copious (but of course relevant) pieces of paper around me. I am in a rectangular room with two windows, multiple doors, and one wall that can fold open but has just been shut ( I’m sure they’re closing so I probably should go soon but let me just finish). Other than the space itself, with tables, chairs and sofas, it is the people that actually interest me. There movement and conversation is what gives this place life. They denote the need for food and drinks, and they demonstrate the joy of human company. You can hear a child, a parent, a couple, friends and families, students and ‘grown-ups’ melding into one harmonious matrix of sound. I think it’s pleasant as the outside sound melds with the clicking of my laptop keyboard, and the album playing into my right ear whilst the other headphone dangles at my side.