Sonic Architecture Quotes

I've been into Sonic Youth since junior high school. I think I kind of have ADD, so it's good music for ADD because it just throws you in different directions all the time. I really like Kim Gordon's voice and Thurston Moore's voice, and I like the guitars going off on tangents.

We are increasingly likely to find ourselves in places with background music. No composers have thought to write for these modern spaces, which represent 30% of our musical experience.

You have to love writing a song and architecture. You have to give it a form. It is my job to create a sonic landscape. I like to create ambiance and atmosphere. The writing is the intimate part of it. It is a sketch. The production is the whole painting.

To write music is to raise a ladder without a wall to lean it against. There is no scaffolding: the building under construction is held in balance only by the miracle of a kind of internal logic, an innate sense of proportion.

I see music as fluid architecture.

I don’t have a theoretical language for music. I’m really inspired by sculpture, so I like to say, ‘you’re not making music, you’re creating a space. You’re building a room, putting some objects in it, and seeing what happens to the objects over time.’

There are certain sounds that I've found work well in nearly any context. Their function is not so much musical as spatial: they define the edges of the territory of the music.

Music is mathematics, the mathematics of listening, mathematics for the ears.

Ultimately, what we do as musicians, I think of us as a type of emotional engineer. We essential take these sound waves, this sound, and we organize it into emotion, and that's how we connect with our audiences.

The idea of 'Badlands' was creating a space with sound, which is a really difficult thing to do.

'Badlands' is a very tangible record; a lot of the sounds were actual things: they were pots and pans, and they were rocks, and they were voices, and instruments used in a way to create a landscape of sound.

I have a real love of sound and the shape of the sound. I'm a musician, and I'm fascinated with the effects of sound, and tone, and pitch and melody and all that sort of stuff.