Sound Views of the Barbican Estate was a practical research project focused on the relationship between music and architecture. Using Chamberlain, Powell and Bon's Barbican Estate as a conceptual and compositional tool, I created an interactive listening experience which performed an architectural role, by altering the listeners' perception, experience, and usage of the Barbican’s public ‘high-rise’ space.
Embracing the oft-criticised complexity of the high-rise layout as something playful and novel, and encouraging exploration of it, I hoped not only to increase usage of the Barbican’s abundant communal space, but also to alter the nature of the listeners’ interaction with their physical environment, promoting an active and emotionally resonant interaction with the existing architecture.
Whilst an intimacy between music and architecture can be observed in work now centuries old, modern developments in the fields of portable media and technology continue to broaden potential for the exploration and expansion of this relationship. Combining spatio-temporal musical structures with location aware hardware, I developed a techno-musical framework whereby musical phrases are organised spatially, each being assigned a specific location in which they can be heard. As the listener explores the space, they also explore the composition, governing their own musical experience by moving within the architecture. Sound Views of the Barbican Estate is made from electronically manipulated location recordings of the architecture, and a trio of Flute, Violin, and Piano (instrumentalists from the Guildhall School of Music). It was distributed as a mobile app for iOS.