Sound and Architecture: A Dialogue of the Improbable and the Intimate

By Victoria Keddie

Walker Publishing Filed to Design · Part of Sounds of Space

Victoria Keddie at The Museum Angewandte Kunst, 2024. Photo by Liz Flyntz. Courtesy of the artist.

In a recent radio interview, I described approaching architecture as a series of vessels—spaces built for social and individual rituals. These places either reinforce normative behaviors, or break radically from tradition, inspiring new methodologies, religions, and interactions.

I am particularly drawn to architectural renderings considered improbable or impossible. This categorization intrigues me, as a way of envisioning how societal rules—those that restrict, homogenize, and instruct—can be broken. Radical thinking, embodied in imagined structures, transcends the limitations of our physical world, thriving in the conceptual space of drawings. Here, impossibility becomes a catalyst for free thought.

With this in mind, I began researching speculative architecture. I found a clear connection between this open, imaginative space and possibilities for sound. In architectural acoustics, the built structure shapes sound in tandem with its material existence—a partnership that can be organized, diagrammed, and measured. But what happens when we attempt to sound “impossible” spaces? How can I, for instance, determine the sound of someone else’s intimate thoughts, articulated as an architectural vessel? My approach has been to initiate a dialogue as if to say, “Hello,” and then wait for a response that deepens the engagement.

During my four-month residency in 2023 at theMax Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt, Germany, I continued this exploration. One of the works I developed, Envisioning Sound within the Plastic Sphere: A Composition for the Unbuilt, delves into how sound can be generated, moved, and transformed within the unrealized Garvey House No.1 by American architect Bruce Goff (1904–82), proposed as a residential home for musicians in Urbana, Illinois, in 1952.

Goff’s architectural philosophy, steeped in musicality, is evident in his renderings, commissioned for violinist and music professor John Garvey. The design is eccentric. The drawings depict a transparent circular structure housing a series of small pods for listening, sleeping, recording, and so on. The central space features a small botanical garden supported by an arched vortex. A spiral ramp stems upwards from the sphere’s center, enveloped by a half-torus geometry of resin.

The exterior facade was envisioned entirely in plexiglass plastic, a novel material of the post-WWII era, with aluminum as the supporting framework connected with large industrial fans oscillating from these supports. Although conceived with musical form in mind, the intricate design presents acoustic challenges, such as conflicting materials and temperatures, guarded by a synthetic plastic membrane.

My process began by creating a dimensional model of the drawings to explore how sound interacts with form, environment, and materials. With the support of the Skylab architectural team and with access to archival documents housed at the Art Institute of Chicago, I could access a virtual recreation of Bruce Goff’s Garvey House No. 1. From here, I worked with Odeon, an architectural sounding software, to mathematically simulate the acoustic space. Additionally, I incorporated historical temperature data and Goff’s botanical interests, particularly his study of resilient North American orchids, to envision an environment where specific elements remained open to interpretation.

In composing sound, I recorded overtone and whistle tones from the violin and flute, collaborating with violinist Laura Ortman and sound engineer Stefan Redeker at the Max Planck Institute in 2023, and flutist Claire Noelle and sound engineer Keith Rodger at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, in 2024. These enriched microtonal sounds are modulated by plastic particles influenced by live meteorological data from Urbana, Illinois, using an algorithmic prediction of internal conditions. By treating plastic as a membrane, I explore microscopic tonal fluctuations and spectral matter typically inaudible in sound.

The composition is intended to be generative, operating as an open algorithm within a micro-ecology. With no physical structure in place, the optimal space for both generating and experiencing this ongoing work is through radio transmission. My aim is for this to be a piece that can be tuned into and transmitted at any time, shared across a network of radio stations.

Further research led me to the work of Hermann Finsterlin, a Weimar-era German polymath artist. Finsterlin illustrated over 500 impossible architectural renderings, none intended to be built. His works feel organic and otherworldly, embodying multidimensional spaces. With one of his early works, Grundrisse (1919, revisited in 1924), I saw a shift from a formal, tradition-bound design to an exclamation of dimensional freedom. To me, these drawings embody the essence of form and space. The structure within them resembled a character, like the letter “A.” In a second iteration, the drawings mapped a phonetic space—capturing the sound of the letter—symbolizing the ongoing evolution of language as it constantly shifts and transforms.

This realization led me to bridge two seemingly disparate areas of research: Impossible Architecture and Linguistics. A model building mirrored the rigidity, determination, and instruction of a character letter, while the impossible designs reflected an open, exploratory, and radical space of phonetic exchange. I began a new work that encompasses multiple forms and media.

Pshal, P’shaw (an onomatopoeia defined as “nonsense”) is a multimedia exploration of phonetic expression’s auditory and rhythmic nuances through text, sound, video, data, and customized learning software, inspired by Finsterlin’s architectural renderings. The project delves into the sonic landscape of eight diphthongs in U.S. English, recorded with 28 participants from diverse linguistic backgrounds. Beyond technical analysis, the project’s script, infused with a contemporary U.S. Western dialect, explores the primal essence of phonetic expression and its impact on the oral landscape. By designing neural software as a discerning partner, the project resonates with the cadence of oral discourse, shaping sonic outcomes and intentionally manipulating variables.

The installation features composed arrangements, a 12-channel speaker setup, phoneme data, a neural machine, vinyl tubing, neon light, and a 5-channel raster video series. An interwoven, suspended structure delineates invisible lines between syntax points, rendered visible by light, marking initial connections between speech particles. Audiences encounter intricate compositions punctuated by phonetic variations from the 28 participants. Collaborating with Max MSP designer Matthew Ostrowski, we developed a generative platform that navigates phoneme classifications along an x-y axis, refined by an algorithm focused on similarity and difference. This approach allows for a continuously shifting explorative algorithm, balancing moments of rotating polyphony with singular vocal utterances.

Additionally, a 5-channel raster-based video series explores connections in oral discourse, gradually abstracting participant profiles influenced by the frequency and dynamics of their phonetic sounding. On each screen, we can watch as sound essentially dissolves a representational profile into complete abstraction.

Pshal, P’shaw was exhibited at the Museum Angewandte Kunst in Frankfurt, Germany, from May 16 to July 28, 2024. Accompanying the exhibition, a record release with a designed booklet was produced in collaboration with raster media (DE), using the same title. The album features works that forensically expose and alter these recorded phonetic impressions.

Side A, Transients Script, is a piece incorporating the recorded words of each participant, using only the transients—momentary variations in current, voltage, or frequency—present in each word. Side B hosts a selection of titled pieces that examine the differences and similarities between the 28 voices as they repeat words from the designed script. Examples include the tonal choir of the letter “O,” the shifting of sinusoidal waves, and the cracking of voices in the initial sounding of the letter “A.” The accompanying booklet describes my research and process in a conversation with curator Eike Walkenhorst. It can be experienced through movement, observation, reading, and, of course, listening.

As with architecture, conventional language guides formalized thought—a collective literacy that builds structured forms. Yet within these forms, an active energy persists, moving in unexpected and phenomenal ways, diverging from any guided trajectory. I’m captivated by the potential to express this complexity through language in an era where vocabularies are increasingly reductive. If language, like architecture, is a vessel, how can we permeate its frame?

Most recently, I’ve been exploring how imagined languages transcend conventional boundaries to express human emotions more deeply. This ongoing project introduces new sound works generated through linguistic probability within a neural algorithmic framework. These sounds inhabit both physical constructs and dimensionally unbound spaces. Can new phonemes and conventional divergences from imagined languages inspire new ways of conveying human expression through sound?

In my current research, I’m working to understand how phonology and gesture, interplaying between conventional and imagined languages, might evolve into sound compositions. The goal is to incorporate neural computation into a hybrid language framework, with case studies like Hildegard von Bingen’s Lingua Ignota, Helene Smith’s Martian language, and Charles Bliss’s Blissymbolics. This project extends beyond linguistic analysis or musical interpretation; it seeks to create practical tools for conveying human experience in ways that transcend tradition.

By focusing on what lies between architectural lines—listening to the pauses between words—we can uncover spaces of intimacy and openness within the framed cacophony. By developing technological tools built to interact with our environments, I strive to push the boundaries of how we perceive and interact, highlighting also the central role of sound in both navigating and composing within these environments. In this interplay among sound, structure, and language, I hope to foster not only new modes of communication, but also new ways of experiencing the unspoken and the unbuilt.▪︎

Experience Pshal, P’shaw in your own home, or spaces, with an original copy of the record. Now available at Idea House 3, the Walker's collectible design store.