The art of sound in architecture
- Wits Innovation Centre
Artist-in-residence Fellow brings sound innovation to School of Architecture and Planning
The fourth ArtSci4Innovation Postdoctoral Fellow, Dr Warrick Swinney, brought a new perspective in his time at the School of Architecture and Planning (SOAP) in the Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment at Wits University.
Swinney is a musician, composer, and sound designer known under the moniker of Warrick Sony or as the Kalahari Surfers. He has a masters degree in Fine Art from the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town and a PhD in English Creative Writing from the University of the Western Cape.
Swinney recently completed the first half of the fellowship embedded in the SOAP, where he co-taught an elective and gave a variety of public lectures.
While applying for the postdoc, he discovered that there wasn’t a lot of sound teaching in the field of architecture, which surprised and fascinated him. “The research I did to get into the lab opened up the whole world for me,” Swinney says. He had a particular interest in the escape from noise, and how that interacts with the design of buildings.
“I guess what I wanted and what I have been teaching the students is a way of listening and a way of hearing.” Swinney says he feels he has made steps towards showing how important that is in architecture.
Echoing elective
Swinney’s impact in the School is particularly noticeable during the elective he co-taught with SOAP lecturer, Dirk Bahmann. Here, students worked in teams of two to create installations with sound and form, under the title Echoes in a Soundless Room. Projects included the use of lights, quiet chambers, or the use of specific corners of the School building to create a specific atmosphere. The students recorded sounds and processed them to abstract them atmospherically.
Bahman says Swinney “brought a whole other dimension that as architects, we always ignore. I think the spatial dimension of sound is now prevalent as an understanding in the students’ work.” He says he can see a significant difference to previous year’s work, which did not include sound.
Professor Christo Doherty, Founder and Director of the ArtSci4Innovation programme and acting Angela and David Fine Chair in Innovation, was also excited by the quality that came from the elective. “The works showed a high level of technical ability and conceptual thinking. I was also impressed by the evident pride and interest that the students took in their sound installations.”
Participating students were overwhelmingly positive about Sony’s input. Stefan Van Der Westhuizen says the sound-focused sessions became the highlight of his week. “It was a wonderful journey working with Warrick. He was always so helpful and easy to work with,” he says. “I found it very fun and enjoyed learning how to edit, make and play with sound.”
Another student, Tamae Saisha Reddy, said she was very grateful for the experience.”Sound design helped me reach a higher level of consciousness and understanding of places and people, and how the sense of sound in a place can affect the atmosphere significantly, which I will carry with me throughout my career.”
A new dimension
By introducing sonic awareness and audio production skills into Architecture teaching and research, Swinney brought an important new aspect to the work of the School. Doherty emphasises that Swinney’s contribution was bringing innovation to the field. “By bringing sonic awareness and audio production skills into architecture teaching and research, he introduced an important new aspect to the work of the School. “
“Architects are artists,” says Professor Nnamdi Elleh, Head of School, explaining
that having an embedded artist has been a great fit. “Music is the closest discipline to architecture, just because they are both compositions. In terms of delineation or articulation, both buildings and sound have a beginning and some sort of end.”
Swinney cheerfully agrees. “The fellowship has shown me that architects are installation artists in waiting.” He says that in comparison to many fine artists, the architectural students tend to have a structured and technical approach that lends itself well to exhibitions.
He adds that he saw an uplifting sense of interest in collaboration between different disciplines during his time at Wits. For example, he found that people from the departments of music, fine arts, and architecture were all interested in his public lectures.
Swinney will continue the rest of the year-long post-doctoral fellowship remotely in Cape Town, working on his own research outputs inspired by his residency in the Wits School of Architecture and Planning.
This is the fourth ArtSci4Innovation Fellow, hosted by the Wits Innovation Centre. The first two residencies were in the Structured Light Lab in the School of Physics. The third fellow, Dr Hugh Sillitoe, is currently in the Johannesburg Lightning Research Laboratory. Calls for applications are released bi-yearly through the Wits social media platforms.