Fabio Claudio Cervi

I am a musician as well as an architectural designer. I look at space through the phenomenon of sound - as a way to manifest new stories which would otherwise remain unwriten in a visually oversaturated discipline. Similarly, I use images, film and video games to manifest visual stories for my compositions. Space and sound are locked in an ever evolving dance. What will this dance feel like with the emergence of digital environments as landscapes of expression?

My practice involves a constant cross contamination of visual and sonic mediums, and a continuous collaboration with musicians and visual artists. Born in Italy, I have lived, worked and studied in the Czech Republic, United Kingdom and Italy. I have an BSc in Architecture from the University of Bath and worked in architectural practices in London and Treviso.

STEAL THIS ROOM! is a video game and music-making platform that (1) visualises the intangibility of sound (2) so that it can be used in new and different ways to give agency to emerging communities of young musicians.

Sound occurs in space. Sound needs matter to propagate, it needs a space to manifest. When we hear sound we hear the space in which it travels, its materiality, its geometry.

The title STEAL THIS ROOM! references American writer and activist Abbie Hoffman’s 1971 book STEAL THIS BOOK and American-Armenian musicians System Of A Down’s 2002 album STEAL THIS ALBUM!. ‘Stealing’ is used as an emancipatory framework to (1) counteract oppressive and exclusive infrastructures, and (2) to find new forms of expression through the performativity of illicit acts.

Secretive, expensive and yet materially austere, the exclusivity of music recording infrastrucure has defined the music that we hear while simultaneously gatekeeping its architecture. This infrastructure is ‘stolen’ by digitally recreating these spaces and simulating their acoustics using video game engines. Their exclusivity is reappropriated and reproposed as a playable, open source video game, as a playground for sonic and performative experimentation.

What sounds can emerge from digital environments? How can digital environemnts give us agency? How can we per-sonify our bodies in these digital environemnts? How can the architectural design of a music-making video game platform allow for new ways of sonic experimentation for emerging communities of young musicians?

(PLEASE USE HEADPHONES WHEN LISTENING TO THE FILMS)

In Collaboration with:

Mariana Edwards

Musician

Anna Godefroy

Musician

Medium:

Video Game, Film, Sound, Sound Design, Animation

Digital environments translate real life phenomena into code. This translation is approximate, however, performativity can emerge from this limitation. In digital environments acoustics are simulated by breaking down space into 3D pixels called voxels, which imitate the behaviour of air particles. A voxel is static, it is always fixed in its coordinates. Properties of sound pass through it - direction, volume, distortion - and are heard when the player enters its boundaries.

The architecture around a voxel dictates the nature of the sounds inscribed inside of it. This architecture is first and foremost codified. What dictates the nature of a sound is not the architecture’s materiality or geometry, but rather its codified materiality and geometry. This leaves the aesthetics of digital environments separate to their acoustic functionality. The player inhabits two worlds simultaneously, an aesthetic one, and a codified one. The aesthetics of the video game explore this condition.

CONSTRUCTION MANUAL, Isometric Drawing, Animation, Video Game, Film, Sound, Sound Design

The video game is populated with objects present in reverb chambers and music studios. In the real world, each object has a specific materiality and geometry to achieve a desired acoustic quality. Acoustic simulations simulate the same effect.

Digital environments and acoustic simulations allow for a visual translation of the otherwise invisible phenomenon of sound. This visualisation allows for new ways of understanding how space affects sound.

The aesthetic of STEAL THIS ROOM! seeks to visually represent the sonic role of each object: a yellow object, called SOUND is a sound emitting source; a blue object, called SET is a sonically active architectural form; a magenta object, called PERSONA is a player ‘inhabiting’ or ‘per-sonifying’ a SET as an avatar, moving and scaling its form to have an acoustic impact on the sound in the room.

Players can inhabit these SETS and collectively create rooms to shape the sound of their music. Their bodies, or PERSONAS, enter a new mode of architectural per-sonification. Sonic experimentation emerges from this spatial interactivity. Visual experimentation follows. A new mode of musical and architectural performance emerges.

Medium:

Isometric Drawing, Animation, Video Game, Film, Sound, Sound Design

Acoustic acoustics Animation Music Sound Soundscape touchdesigner Unreal Engine Video Games

Medium:

Film, Still Frame

drawings isometric plan section

FURTHER RESEARCH, Plan, Section, Isometric Drawings

Typical Adult Human Ear as an Architectural Etymolgy of Acoustic Spaces – The body is at the centre of a mediation between sound and space. To design space for a sonic experience requires deep spatial, material and architectural understanding. The mediums of the architectural plan and section tie together an analysis of various spaces/forms/sonic experiences. The human ear creates an architectural etymology of spaces designed for sonic perception. The folds and forms of the ear allow for the frequencies within the human voice to the amplified and focused into the ear canal.

Capitol Records Reverb Chambers – Reverb Chambers are a typology of spaces found in the basement of music recording studios from the 1950s. These chamebrs are designed to create specific acoustics within the room through angled walls, materials, irregular or smooth surfaces and objects. A speaker in the room plays a sound which is re-recorded by a microphone within the same room. The new recording is inbued with the acoustics of the room. Most of the popular music of the 20th century has been produced through the use of these reverb chamber

The Listening Wall of Leros – The Listening Wall on the Greek island of Leros, 1943, focuses the faintest noises from distant enemy war planes onto parabolic walls which reflect the sounds onto trenches, where soldiers move and centre their position to retrieve the coordinates and directions of the incoming planes.

Harvard Anechoic Chamber – Around the same time of the reverb chamber, the anechoic chamber was built to create a space of complete silence. It is curious to note the simultaneous emergence of these two spatial typologies - one dedicated to the fashioning of space and its aesthetics into a machine for sonic enhancement, the other to the erasure of any sonic quality alltogether. Conversely, both typologies reduce the aesthetics of space to a curious landscape of unfamiliar shapes purely devoted to the sculpting of an acoustic form.

Rights of Future Generations – The performance ‘Rights of Future Generations’ for the 2019 Sharjah Architecture Triennal by musician Nicolas Jaar shows the way bodies arrange around the invisible placement of loudspeakers. 16 speakers are buried below the sand and play sounds and frequencies, vibrating the earth and the audience’s body above. The power of sound lies in this phenomenon: of placing (or re-placing) the body back into relation with its environment.

'Project Acoustics Review' Acoustic Simulations Trial in Video Games – In the genealogy of acoustic spaces recent developments of video game sound engines offer a new look at the phenomenon of sound and at the next steps in the story of the design of sonic environments in digital spaces. In video games the intrinsically spatial and material realities of sound are translated through approximations of space and material reflection/absorption values. The complexity of sound is transformed into lines of code and is simultaneously visualised and allowed to be understood spatially.

Medium:

Plan, Section, Isometric Drawings

acoustics drawings Landscape Landscapes Sound Soundscape

Fabio Claudio Cervi

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Royal College of Art