Architettura Sonora will present their new line of outdoor and indoor sonic modules at the Fuorisalone in Milan next week during 12-17 April 2011.
Symbolic trees narrate the value of materials, the love for nature, feelings and emotions at the root of design. Important subjects characterizing Maurizio Favetta and KingSize architects’ design process and the approach of all the companies involved in the Fuorisalone event brightening up Via Tortona 26.
Architettura Sonora, and other leading companies of Italian design, will present along with the products its own symbolic interpretation of the “Tree of life” in the spaces in via Tortona 26 inspired by the creative sign of Maurizio Favetta.
“Tree of life” is an immersive journey to the roots of design through the primordial breath of materials, a message of optimism to an asymmetrical but balanced future, exciting but sustainable.
The event is complemented by the culinary performance The Independent Dream: every night during the Milan Furniture Fair a themed dinner will be held within the exhibition spaces.
+ Design: Architettura Sonora
Courtesy Architettura Sonora
ASG Automatic Soundscape Generation
AS™ designs and customizes audio software that is able to dynamically and musically inter-react with specific environmental conditions – such as crowded habitats, both indoor and outdoor, traffic congested areas or industrial environments. Our musically oriented NOISE MASKING system creates sonic islands within a chaotic world.
CITY NOISE MASKING
In the specific case of an urban application, the ASG software aims to change the perception of the disturbance of a polluted city-soundscape through the generation of counter SOUNDSCAPES that are musically oriented. They design an artificial sound oasis to mitigate and redevelop areas that are strongly congested by the city’s mechanical and media noise. The AS™ noise masking approach has been developed in collaboration with prestigious scientific partners, such as CNR (Italian National Research Center).
INDUSTRIAL NOISE MASKING
With INM, Industrial Noise Masking, AS™ offers a specific application for noisy (highly polluted) indoor environments. Based on ASG logical core, its fundamental attitude is to create COMFORTABLE sound areas inside working buildings, where workers and visitors are exposed to an intensive acoustic stress.
Courtesy Architettura Sonora
ARCHITECTURAL MUSIC MAKER
AMM, Architectural Music Maker, has the goal to modify the listener’s approach to both stereo and multichannel music – surrounding home theatre music – and their implied space experiences, setting them free from the behavioral and spatial constraints that stereo music and standard home-theatre produce.
It is possible to generate IMMERSIVE and SURROUNDING sound spaces, which are dynamic and mutable; play your own music, it is up to AS™ to make it architecturally significant and make the architecture you are inhabiting affected and transfigured by your musical choices.
Courtesy Architettura Sonora
ARCHITECTURAL SONIC MODULES
The peculiar shape of AS™ architectural sonic modules is conceived to be acoustically efficient and capable of focusing sound to direct it into predefined areas; combining different sonic modules and their different directional properties allow to fully redesign the ACOUSTIC EXPERIENCE of any architecture, both indoor and outdoor.
Courtesy Architettura Sonora
The distinctive geometry of the reflecting surfaces allows certain types of modules, characterized by a DIRECTIONAL sound emission, to adapt largely to installation areas. Varying and adjusting the orientation of the module or the sound design can guide the attention and movement of people in certain directions, exploring and redesigning specific architectural features, or creating multiple and independent micro-areas inside the whole main space.
Courtesy Architettura Sonora
Other types of modules are characterized by an OMNIDIRECTIONAL sound emission; the richness of their tones and their radial diffusion resembles the one of a natural sound source.
Approaching the module in a natural environment you can sense a smooth and regular increase of sound pressure level and feel the profound wideness of the sound source, such as when approaching a waterfall or a playground; in an indoor context, their unpredictable omnidirectional reflections are even more intriguing, because they can interact with the architecture, EXCITING “the architectural game” of space discovering.
Courtesy Architettura Sonora
SONIC GARDEN
When we talk about LANDSCAPE we often discuss it in purely visual terms, without considering that its appreciation is also influenced by the general environment of the site, a space rich of sound sources all involved in the orchestration of a specific soundscape: sounds created by wildlife, sounds of nature like water flowing, wind and leaves, human activities and also maintenance operations.
The realms of sonic outdoor design have always been an important component in landscape architecture: music from splashing jets, caged birds, and chimes have always been historically an integral part of the MULTISENSORY experience provided by gardens, with powerful and beneficial effects on our minds and emotions.
In the XII century the famous Arab inventor and engineer Al-Jazari, made the most famous PERSIAN gardens play by way of his amazing inventions, like a garden flute that played a continuous note; water drove air out of vessels and into the flute’s mouthpiece to make it play, on the lines of a whistling kettle. This was the method used for the artificial birdsong fashionable in grand gardens of the time.
The ITALIAN RENAISSANCE gardens, which flourished in the late XV century, were intended as a place for contemplation and for the enjoyment of the sights, sounds and smells of the garden itself. The lively play of the waters that delighted the visitors to the Villa d’Este in Tivoli was portrayed as a real wonder: the Fountain of the Owl used a series of bronze pipes like flutes to make the sound of birds and the music played by the great Organ Fountain was described as “true music, naturally created”.
Historical JAPANESE gardens as well can be described as an auditory scene rather than a visual one. The Japanese gardeners used different materials not only to control movements and visions, but also to add the dimension of sound to the garden and through sound amplify the sense of ‘near’ and ‘far’ within the garden. Soil paths dampen the sounds of footsteps, gravel adds a crunching sound and stepping stones provide a percussive tapping sounds.
Courtesy Architettura Sonora
The increasing influence of mechanization has raised various issues related to natural soundscapes and ACOUSTIC ECOLOGY within and around historical parks and gardens, especially connected to the intensification of “unwanted sounds” in garden maintenance and the always rising level of noise-pollution created by urban traffic.
The research carried on by ARCHITETTURA SONORA enables us not only to explore new dimensions of acoustic design but also to reclaim an integral appreciation of garden environment in general, defining new frameworks of environmental acoustic design developed on a multi-sensory and immersive approach to architectural spaces and landscape.
Courtesy Architettura Sonora
Our SONIC GARDEN LAB at Villa Beccari, in the outskirts of Florence, is a real ongoing lab where we are constantly testing the environmental, experimental and naturalistic meaning of our immersive audio systems: from renewable energy equipment to sound interaction with anthropic and climatic variables, showing our own state of art in unconventional sound modules design for architecture and keeping permanently running interactive soundcompositions focused on city noise masking and immersive sound design.
The location, a wonderful historical Renaissance style garden, is adjacent to an intensely busy highway connecting Florence to Rome; we considered such a significant noise source the perfect location to test our noise masking and artificial sound generation software. The peculiar audio system installed includes 32 AS sonic emitters, distributed among three independent areas of the garden; there are both floor standing modules, such as Sphere, Yoyo and Big Yoyo, and suspended modules, such as Dolphin, Drop, Helmet and Snail. During different times of the day, corresponding to different traffic flows and peaks, our ASG audio software inter-reacts dynamically and musically with the specific environmental conditions changing the perception of the disturbance through the generation of a musically oriented counter soundscapesthat creates a SONIC COMFORT ISLAND within the chaotic ambiance.
+ All images and drawings courtesy Architettura Sonora
