Music and architecture students join forces
- Wits Innovation Centre
Architecture and sound came together innovatively at the recent Resonant Spaces performance.
The project was the culmination of the most recent ArtSci4Innovation Postdoctoral Fellowship, in which musician, composer, and sound designer, Dr Warrick Swinney, was embedded in the School of Architecture and Planning (SOAP) within the Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment at Wits University.
Music echoed and flowed throughout four stories in the main stairwell of the SOAP building. The landing of each floor held a duo of musicians using a mix of instruments and voices. They were positioned behind flowing fabric with projections of sculptural models. Together, the performances overlapped and blended into a soundscape that spoke to how disciplines worked alongside each other in the creative process.
Swinney notes the significance of staging the performance in a transient space. “Stairs are places people go through without noticing them, or the fact that they've had amazing acoustics, so they've warmed the place and made it very human,” he says.
In the first part of the fellowship, Swinney had taught architectural students to create installations that involve both sound and form. This was then extended into further multi-disciplinary exploration, by tasking students of music to compose and perform live pieces based on the original creations.
Tamae Saisha Reddy, one of the second-year architectural students, presented a piece called A/Sound, which explores concepts of being present in space. The music students leaned into this by moving between moments of calm and chaos.
She says she worked very well with the music students and found that they took her thinking process seriously. “It was actually really interesting, because they were so open to learning about what inspired the sound itself,“ Reddy says.
Swinney worked together with architecture lecturer Dirk Bahmann and music lecturers Cara Stacey and Cameron Harris. Stacey, a lecturer in Creative Music Technologies at the Wits School of Arts, notes that the exercise encouraged students to think beyond the specific genres or methods of music making they may be used to. “A project like this is really trying to get them to think about sound in a bigger way and listen to things they’ve never heard before,” she says.
“I'm blown away by what's been achieved,” says Professor Christo Doherty, Founder and Director of the ArtSci4Innovation programme and acting Angela and David Fine Chair in Innovation.
He applauds how the project has allowed mutual growth for students from different fields. “Both the music students and the architecture students have learnt from each other and explored that architecture is about creating spaces, and sound is about utilising and feeling spaces.“