Workshop: A Building Made of Sound: Yerevan Sonic Architectures

Presented by @quartertone_ as part of Crossroads Festival

Conveners: Gascia Ouzounian and Ruben Antonyan

In this workshop, students from the Yerevan Komitas State Conservatory will explore the architecture of the conservatory building through listening, sound recording, and acoustic sensing. Over the course of one day, we will listen to and record the building’s interior and exterior spaces using a variety of sensors: acoustic microphones, electromagnetic sensors, and contact microphones (which sense mechanical vibrations and convert those vibrations into sound). We will also excite the building using musical instruments; however, we will not use these instruments to make music, but rather as devices for activating acoustic architectural responses such as echoes and vibrations. This vibrational and acoustic exploration of the building will form the basis of a collective composition that will reveal the building as a sonic architecture heard, experienced, and activated by the group. We will listen to the building both as a self-contained architecture and as a structure which is in dialogue with the sounds of the city that surrounds it, connecting the building to its wider urban context in Yerevan. Coming out of the workshop, we will collectively produce an album of the Yerevan State Conservatory reimagined as a building made of sound.

This is Ouzounian’s second workshop with Crossroads Festival. In 2023, Ouzounian and Eve Egoyan hosted ‘Scoring: Yerevan,’ for which participants created scores about spaces in Yerevan using graphic notation, text scores, photography, and musical improvisation.