David Byrne’s Space Music

Dancing about architecture may not have caught on just yet, but the former frontman for Talking Heads is still interested in buildings and music. At this year’s TED event, he talked about the relationship between music and the spaces it is performed in…

Music In Context

Recorded music is actually a very recent phenomenon, having been invented towards the end of the 19th Century (Edison’s phonograph was patented in 1878), but musical creation and performance dates back many millennia.

It is interesting to consider how the places we inhabit influence the music we make. Gothic cathedrals are perfect for choral work, with haunting reverbs spreading through the vaulted ceilings, whereas the claustrophobic asymmetry of clubs like CBGB’s suited the lurchingly sparse sound of Talking Heads’ first albums.

The world of the bedroom producer, working with headphones and a laptop, is perhaps a new space in this context – a purely artificial space, created on a blank canvas using convolution reverbs and impulse responses lifted from other locations entirely. There are pitfalls and benefits to this approach, of course – but a good appreciation of real-world space is probably required before one should attempt to make music in a vacuum…