I started reading this article in the Guradian without realising the profundity of it until some way through. It is actually a fascinating piece about a music critic Nick Coleman who had a sudden total hearing loss in one ear, and what happened after that. Particularly interesting was the fact that before he lost his hearing he experienced music as architecture;
I don’t know how you hear music. I imagine that if you like music at all then it has, in your head, some kind of third dimension to it, a dimension suggesting space as well as surface, depth of field as well as texture. Speaking for myself, I used to hear “buildings”… three-dimensional forms of architectural substance and tension. I did not “see” these buildings in the classic synaesthetic way so much as sense them. These forms had “floors”, “walls”, “roofs”, “windows”, “cellars”.
This is what happened to him after his hearing loss;
What I hear now when I listen to music is a flat, two-dimensional representation. Where I used to get buildings, I now only get architectural drawings. I can interpret what the drawings show, but I don’t get the actual structure: I can’t enter music and I can’t perceive its inner spaces. I’ve never got much of an emotional hit from technical drawings. Here is what really hurts: I no longer respond to music emotionally.
He then met Oliver Sacks the famous neuroscientist who had personally lost his ability of stereoscopy something he has treasured all his life. Both these losses made these people experience forms of space in mono….. monospace.
It proves to me the link that I’ve always felt between the experience of space and music, and that as an Architect and fan of music I find their pleasures somehow equivalent. While not hearing building I definetly sense space, and in Architecture while not experiencing tunes I definetly think of space as being somehow musical. The article is also touching to me as perhaps I am on the brink of loosing this feeling to, that my right ear hears at about 50% of normal I’ve felt that my brain somehow makes up for that when I listen to my ipod forinstance, but for how long?
Monospace
I started reading this article in the Guradian without realising the profundity of it until some way through. It is actually a fascinating piece about a music critic Nick Coleman who had a sudden total hearing loss in one ear, and what happened after that. Particularly interesting was the fact that before he lost his hearing he experienced music as architecture;
This is what happened to him after his hearing loss;
He then met Oliver Sacks the famous neuroscientist who had personally lost his ability of stereoscopy something he has treasured all his life. Both these losses made these people experience forms of space in mono….. monospace.
It proves to me the link that I’ve always felt between the experience of space and music, and that as an Architect and fan of music I find their pleasures somehow equivalent. While not hearing building I definetly sense space, and in Architecture while not experiencing tunes I definetly think of space as being somehow musical. The article is also touching to me as perhaps I am on the brink of loosing this feeling to, that my right ear hears at about 50% of normal I’ve felt that my brain somehow makes up for that when I listen to my ipod forinstance, but for how long?