Phenomenological Detailed Research

Phenomenological Research

Case Study Designs in Music Therapy

p.189 “Vibroacoustic therapy studies purported to alleviate many different symptoms, physical problems and psychological disorders, an the field was open to abuse and could even be accused of having a ‘cure all’ profile.”

“…the value of vibroacoustic therapy is that it influences both psychological and physiological activity. While it is undoubtedly an enjoyable form of treatment, with very few side effects reported so far, one has to accept that the placebo effect can be very influential. Where music itself is considered a ‘placebo’ on VA therapy (given that pulsed sinusoidal low frequency tones are the primary stimulus of treatment), it is important to establish both the influence and effect of the treatment of vibroacostic therapy when compared with music on its own or no intervention.”

“…the results of the trials considering the small sample groups involved, particularly in the clinical studies on high muscle-tone. However, the value of considering the evidence from a series of studies, [sic] is the process by which one can integrate information collected independently and better formulate a theory of treatment. These studies have shown us that arousal levels are clearly influenced and reduced, and physical effects do include reduced muscle activity and slower heart rate. The applicability of that will not simply be confined to populations of clients with cerebral palsy, in particular severe spasticity, they can also be applied to other populations for whom anxiety, high arousal levels and stress provoke problems in daily living and somatic health.

Pamphlet Architecture – Architecture as a Translation of Music

p.16 “Let’s say, simply for a point of departure, that there exists a definable membrane through which meaning can move when translating from one discipline to another. …[A] membrane is a thin pliable layer that connects two things and is, in this case, the middle position of music + architecture. …A semi-tone is a transitional sound heard during articulation linking two phonemically contiguos sounds, like the y sound often heard between the i and the e of quiet. A y-condition, in the middle position of music + architecture when translating one to another. Louis Kahn once described great architecture as that which starts with the immeasurable, proceeds through the measurable, and returns to the immeasurable.”

p.30 “Le Cylindre Sonore” Bernhard Leitner

“The combined effect is the acoustically delineation of space and the physical massing of sound. Sound is no longer exclusively the instrument of musical expression; designed with precision, it becomes a building material in the creation of space. Sound’s ability to merge with other sounds and its lack of borders represents a phenomenal equivalent to the artistic concepts of interpretation, nonobjective, and nonobstruction. Active processes that se sound’s invisibility and temporality interpret sound as having a characteristic of nonbeing. By enclosing a moment, Le Cylindre Sonore creates a field in which acoustical experience may occur, “kompositionsprozesse” (Arthur Schnabel) ‘it is not the aural effect that is prescribed, but the process that generates it.’ In this instance, product and process are the same; there is no longer a question of the reproduction of an experience – each visit to the cylinder produces the work for the first time.

p.46 “Sonic Space of the Long-Stringed Instrument” Ellen Fullman

“Inside an old candy factory in Austin, black draped walls optically recede, creating the illusion of endless space. One hundred and twenty long strings suspended at waist height define the horizon line. Illuminated from above, the highlights seem to float infinitely in space before dissolving in the void. The Long-Stringed Instrument, a spatial and temporal exploration. Created and refined as a collaboration with engineers and instrument builders experimenting with wire, resonator boxes, and tuning systems. Physically vast, the strings span eighty-five feet. A performer must enter the installation and move among the wires to make music. Stepping back one becomes a viewer, seeing others players slowly glide through space, in relationship to other performers traveling. Loud sonic textures fill the room; inside the instrument, you are inside the sound. The music expresses the properties of longitudinally vibrating elongated strings. As the performer’s position within the strings continually changes, so do the proportionate lengths created by pressed fingers dampening the strings. The constantly changing lengths produce cascading secondary pitches – the overtones. Overtones result from the fact that a body vibrates in section as well as along its total length. B focusing on the overtones while slowly walking and rubbing fingers on the wires, the performer experiences the order of nature through the physics of sound Vibrations, the physical manifestation of sound, move through the body. The shifting of one’s attentions between the fundamental pitches and the always changing overtones induces a hyper-meditative state, altering one’s perception of time. The intellectual space of harmonic intervals is planar.”

p.64 “Computation and Composition”

“We stand at the dawn of an era that will see the emancipation of architecture from matter. The intuition that allows us to even consider architecture as “frozen music” or music as “molten architecture” comes from a deep and ancient understanding that, in its very essence, architecture exceeds building, as music exceeds sound.”

Frie Otto – Tensile Structures

“The oldest examples of tensile structures are tents and suspension bridges. Today they are supplemented by the tensile supporting surfaces for roof constructions made of nets and membranes or of tractive three-dimensional rope configurations, and tower and suspended-housing structures.”

Frei Otto Form und Konstruktion Phillip Drew

p.34 Munich Olympia Park. Good images of wires and joints. Grid system, octagonal, square, triangular, hexagonal. Steel trusses used as support posts for peaks.”

p.42 Seating overhangs – look like the Provencher Bridge

p.44-5 Wire structures/models playing with forms, metal screen, larger spaces

p.54-61, 64, 72, 87,