How we experience sound today embodies the characteristics of why we as humans have sought out music over time; that being for its emotion evoking qualities that are personally and subjectively manipulated like a raw material. However, this relationship is dynamic, and because of current technologies it has increasingly progressed toward an ephemeral existence in the way that we listen and record sound. As always, how we listen to sound is directly related to space, but in the case of our ever increasing technological development this relationship has evolved into one with an absence of space.
This thesis is an exploration of the discrepancies between the way we listen to music and the architecture that affects it. The technological advances in sound recording and performance over the past century have dramatically changed this relationship, creating a soundspace that today can exist solely between one’s headphones—in one’s headspace.
The increasingly small scale of the modern soundscape necessitates an examination of the relationship between the permanent and the temporary; the ordinary and the event; the present and the forgotten. This thesis pairs these relationships to create a space that aims to be at two places at once, and at two moments in time. “Subway Sound” seeks to do this by connecting a user to the permanent-yet-forgotten space of the abandoned Cincinnati subway, while examining the technological connections and discrepancies between sound and the space that it occupies.