The architecture of music: Design by analogy

Abstract

Music has the potential to evoke some of our deepest emotions and drastically alter our moods simply through specific combinations of notes. Architecture too, should have this potential. This thesis aims at investigating the secret of emotion in music, as it is an attempt to draw an analogy that may help to create a deeper architectural experience. A great musical composition is like a dream. When it is convincing in its narrative it draws you in, and makes you believe in its reality, stirring emotions within you for no apparent reason. When you look deeper into the nature of a musical composition, like musicologists have been doing, you discover that testable, psychological devices are applied in order to evoke greater emotional responses from listeners. By studying the work of Ludwig van Beethoven, I believe that I can translate these aural devices into visual and tactile ones, in the form of a housing development in Auckland city. Housing developments suffer from problems of monotony, due to their repetitive and modular nature. This project seeks to provide an alternative to these monotonous schemes by using a piece of music as a design brief. Highly architectural pieces of music are already perfectly balanced in their blend between variation and repetition, and are therefore great for regulating order. I have chosen a piece of music, the Pathétique sonata by Ludwig van Beethoven, as inspiration because of its complex architecture, and because there are many professional analyses of it from which to study. My goal in this thesis is to reveal the wealth of architectural ideas hidden within highly structured pieces of music.