How Architecture Shapes Music: From Cathedrals to Streaming Intros | Tanmay Kulkarni

Acoustic Experiment: Talking in a Cathedral Simulation

[0:00]Listen to one sentence inside a simulated cathedral. >> Every word you play is asking a question. >> For that, every word is still ringing when the next one arrives. Same sentence, same cathedral. This time slower with room between the phrases. >> Every word you play is asking a question. >> Nobody touched the cathedral. The

Introduction: David Byrne’s "How Music Works" & Room Questions

[0:30]Speaker changed. Hold on to that because it's the whole video. Hi, this is Tanmay Kulkarni in for Humanitarian's AI. This video is about a book, How Music Works by David Byrne, the singer from Talking Heads. It's big idea is that music is shaped by the room it's played in. I wanted to know how that shaping actually happens, so I went looking for people who measured it. Here's what I found. The room doesn't write the music, it asks a question. A player hears it and answers. And different players answer the same room in different ways. In the book's first chapter, Byrne argues that music gets made, knowingly or not, to fit the places it'll be heard. On the radio, he gave the

Bach in Small Churches vs. Gothic Cathedral Chants

[1:06]Clearest example I've found. Bach's church was smaller than the Gothic cathedrals before it, so Bach could write fast, busy lines. All of that, Byrne said, would just turn into mush in a Gothic cathedral. And the chant that came before barely changes key. So, in a huge stone room, every note left hanging in the air is still in tune. His own band is his best example. CBGB in New York was a small, long, narrow club in the book he describes a room with very little echo, where every detail of a song came through. Later, Talking Heads played Carnegie Hall, and

Talking Heads: From CBGB’s Dry Room to Carnegie Hall

[1:36]Byrne noticed that some of the songs he'd written didn't sound all that great in halls like that. That's composers adjusting over centuries, but if Byrne is right, it should show up in a single player on a single night. Musicians have said so for a long time. In 1752, the flautist Johann Joachim Quantz told players to slow down in echoing rooms so the notes don't blur together, which is exactly what I did with that sentence. Then someone actually checked. Two researchers in Berlin recorded the cellist John Gyeant Carros playing all six of Bach's cello suites in seven European concert halls. They measured

The Cello Study: Jean-Guihen Queyras in 7 European Halls

[2:10]How much each hall echoed and how fast he played every movement. In the most echoing halls, he slowed down. Fonts would have nodded. The part that made me stop. In the driest halls, the ones with almost no echo, he slowed down, too. Too much echo, slower. Too little echo, also slower. And one measure of the hall's echo accounted for about 74% of how his tempo moved. That's one player in seven rooms, but it's a strong pattern. So, why slow down in a dry room? He told them that in echoing halls, he slows down to avoid a muddy sound and lets the pauses run longer. For the dry halls, the explanation is the researchers' own. With no echo to carry a note, a player may hold notes longer to make up for sound that isn't there. That's their reading, not his words, but look at what

Why Cellists Slow Down in BOTH Echoing and Dry Rooms

[2:51]It means. The same answer, slower to two opposite questions. The same team tried it on more people. 12 musicians, 14 simulated concert halls, and here the hall's echo explained under 9% of their tempo, even after allowing for each player's own habits. The paper calls their strategies very individual. Almost all of them said they lengthen pauses in echoing rooms, but mostly in slow pieces. In fast pieces, they kept the notes short and clean instead. And to be fair to the simpler story, two earlier studies looked for it. One used the Cleveland Orchestra, the other a grand piano in a room with adjustable echo. Neither found the simple pattern, more echo, slower playing, that fits. The room doesn't set the tempo. It sets

Strategy Variations Across 12 Musicians & 14 Simulated Halls - Environmental Adaptation Beyond Humans: Urban Bird Pitch Shifts

[3:31]A problem, and each player solves it their own way. So, here's a way to listen for this anywhere. When a place seems to have shaped some music, listen for what the room takes away, who's hearing it, and what they change to get it back. Then the test. If every player answers the same way, the room is close to deciding. If they answer differently, it's only asking. It isn't only people. In 2003, researchers in Leiden recorded great tits, a small songbird, in quiet and noisy parts of the city. Traffic noise is mostly low rumble. The birds in the noisy spots sang with a higher lowest note,

Lifting their songs above it. Here, the room isn't echo, it's noise, and the answer isn't tempo, it's pitch. Burns' book makes the same argument about machines. He starts with Edison cylinders, when bands had to perform the same song again and again for each batch of recordings. A recording format is a room made of minutes. In 1925, Igor Stravinsky had a contract to record his music, so he wrote a piano suite, his serenade in A, with every movement short enough to fit one side of a 78 RPM record, about 3 minutes at most. Newest room is a playlist you can skip. A researcher at Ohio State, Hubert

Recording Formats as Rooms: Edison Cylinders to 5-Second Intros

[4:35]Léveillé Gouvin, studied 303 US top 10 hits from 1986 to 2015. The wait before the voice comes in fell from more than 20 seconds in the mid-80s to about five. In talking to a reporter, he put it like this, "It's just adapting yourself to your environment, whether you're aware of it or not." That's Burns' argument. From someone who counted. One caution, in a second study, he compared hits with less popular songs by the same artists, and the pattern didn't hold. A short intro doesn't make a hit, so the room shapes the music, it still doesn't decide it. Before I play mine, try yours. In a moment, clap once wherever you are. If the clap hangs in the air after your hands stop, your room has echo. If it

Interactive Room Clap Test & Final Reflection

[5:15]Dies right away, it's dry. Go ahead. Now say the sentence, "Every room you play in is asking you a question." at the pace your room seems to want. Do you speed up or slow down? That's your answer. A real answer names what your room was doing, blurring your words or swallowing them. Just saying it felt different doesn't count. Here's mine in two rooms like the ones the cellist slowed down in. First, the cathedral. Every room you play in is asking a question. >> Now, almost no echo at all. Every room you play in is asking you a question. Slower than I'd normally say it. One is waiting for the echo to clear. The other is filling in for an echo that never comes. Same answer, opposite questions. Every room is asking. Tanmay Kolkarni, in for Humanitarians AI, signing off.