David Prochaska: As a society, we often find ourselves struggling to define the interface we experience between the external world and that of the internal (body). This interaction requires us to demarcate the boundaries establish between the body, its environment, and the designed social spaces that confront it. Modern architecture has looked to isolate the collective experience, homogenizing the architectural space into a blueprint for what has been term a "constructed silence." Housed within these structures, long distance mass communication has allowed us to transcend space and time at the push of a button. This freedom has brought with it, sprawling isolation. We have become such specialized receivers of multiple stimuli systems and technologies that many look to fill this isolation with the latest technological environments available. These same technologies, and the environments they create, further empower this isolation. Allowing us to transform the once "public space" into yet another private space, once again isolated from the outside environment.
Natural Environment vs Constructed Reality
I too believe the questions evolving out of this relationship between Sound and Architecture, center on the opposing forces experienced between the natural environment and our constructed reality. In your book, Site and Sound: of Architecture and the Ear (co—edited with Steve Roden) you address the work of Bernard Tschumi and his assertion that the relationship between the body and its surroundings is one of "disjunction", where …"every room is potentially comforting as well as potentially disturbing, each view relaxing one's thoughts as well as causing anxiety". My questions is; can we find a way to utilize these opposing forces so as to reestablish a union between humanity and its interaction within social (architectural) space.

Brandon LaBelle: In some ways I'd say that is what some of Tschumi's work is concerned with—to actualize, in the forms of architecture, such a "unity." Though at the same time, such disjunction, for Tschumi, forms a productive tension—so, it's not so much a question of resolving anything, but more amplifying it, through underscoring "usage", and the experience of the individual.

Where do you see the conflict finding resolution between the natural environment and the constructed realities we experience in modern architecture?

I don't think we ever find resolution; my feeling is that searching for such resolution only reinforces their (nature and culture) opposition, so the need for resolution perpetuates itself (self—fulfilling prophesy?). Maybe what Tschumi, and others, point toward is a way out of such oppositional terminology itself by highlighting how disjunction is a force of reality, and part of the vocabulary of buildings. So, rather than seek the totalizing vision of "unity" (as in Modern architecture), Tschumi builds the rupture, the split, the break.

What role do you see sound art playing in the transformation of public space. And how do you see the medium of sound building a more "sympathetic resonance" between these two forces?

Sound, and auditory culture, transforms public space by replacing the "alphabetical" with the "acoustical" as a paradigm. That is to say, inserting sound—production into public space introduces a shift in perceptual models in which language, representation, and vision (as constituting the alphabetical model) give way to an "outside" to language, non—representation, and hearing (as the acoustical model). What the acoustical then offers is probably a different way of organizing things like public space, not to mention personal perception; shifting the hierarchy of the senses, is also to propose a social shift.