Instruments: Reimaging the Music Room explores the detection and recognition of an immaterial audio presence or sonic architectures that exists in the home, engendered by our domestic rituals, their space and objects.

This audio presence requires the inhabitant to recognise a spatial acuteness, cognition, and mapping, which isn’t necessarily rational, visible or haptic. In turn, the inquiry has generated projects, which offer novel design solutions and alternative ‘sonic’ experiences for contemporary home life.

“If the soundscape is distributed temporally, it is also distributed spatially. The nature of the domestic environment is such that different areas can have quite distinct sets of sounds occurring concurrently. A teenager’s bedroom may be the site of loud music, while the kitchen is filled with the sounds of food preparation, and the study is very quiet. However, while rooms are bounded physical spaces, largely sonically configured by the activities going on within them, sounds often leak from room to room, and can be heard in physically distant parts of the home. Sonicspace has the potential to transcend physical space, meaning that the sonic blueprint of a home is, in key ways, different from its physical, architectural blueprint.”

Sonic Interventions: Understanding and Extending the Domestic Soundscape, Gerard Oleksik, David Frohlich, Lorna M. Brown, Abigail Sellen

Exhibition at Ventura Lambrate during Salone del Mobile Milano.