Thesis: Rongxuan (Roxanne) Zhou

AURICULAR / PARTICULAR: The Production of Sonic Architecture and a Mixed-Reality Experience Within

This thesis project addresses the production of an architectural experience driven by the auditory sense and the capability of sound to assume a significant role in the design process. The proposal is a prototype for an interactive architectural installation under the Girard Avenue Bridge that uses facial recognition, sound samples, and various speaker setups to create and modulate spatial and sonic experiences

Rongxuan (Roxanne) Zhou
The sonic experience materializes when one encounters an architectural environment and is open to receiving and perceiving sound objects within or produced by the architecture through either passive or active listening. There are 4 layers to the sonic experience (site, structure, sound space, and virtual realm), each of which presents opportunities for involving different technologies to engage with space. This experience has an intrinsic particularity, and the sound within this experience has an epistemological significance. As humans and sound bestow cultural meanings on each other through the act of listening and as this reciprocity develops through the accumulation of individual auditory experiences, each person builds a repository of auditory interpretations that would contribute to nuances in emotional responses
Rongxuan (Roxanne) Zhou

Rongxuan (Roxanne) Zhou
Rongxuan (Roxanne) Zhou
Sound is essential to the architectural experience, yet it is often overlooked in the design process. The concern of sound in an architectural environment only emerges either as noise abatement, which not only is a passive approach but also indicates that sound is treated as a byproduct of the architectural design, or as acoustic performance when the program is related to sound or performing arts. Sound is rarely granted the power to be the driving factor in the architectural design process. While it is challenging to find a universal method of representation for both the qualitative aspects of the sonic environment and the subjective experience, the potential of sound as both design parameter and building material deserves systematic inquiry.

The spatiality and temporality of sound create opportunities for human interaction to become an influencing factor in the design process. This allows for a proactive engagement with the sonic environment as well as the architectural environment. Given today’s technology to blend the boundary between physical and digital environments, it is possible to auralize the engagement in real-time.
Rongxuan (Roxanne) Zhou

Rongxuan (Roxanne) Zhou
By engaging with sound objects and reacting to the physical conditions of the site, the project serves as an addition and activation to the existing soundscape. Through an interactive, mixed- reality medium made possible by spatial tracking and algorithmic composition, the project also intends to celebrate the particularity of an individual’s auditory experience within an architectural environment and the impact it could generate to affect the collective experience. The project ultimately promotes active listening in an architectural environment where sound serves as both a design parameter and a building material as well as the mutual influence between humans and the meanings that the architecture contains.
Rongxuan (Roxanne) Zhou

Thesis: Rongxuan (Roxanne) Zhou

Students