Musical Deconstruction / Reconstruction: Visualizing architectonic spaces through music

There is a common belief that music and architecture are connected through a hidden a dimension. Both arts, when abstracted intellectually (through mathematics) or emotionally (through phenomenological experience), share a number of ordering principles, having the same notion of crescendo in sequence and progression. Many have sought to unlock this hidden dimension to create artwork that lets our souls transcend up to the heavens. There are five different methods where architects have used music in their design approach: there are those who use harmonic proportions found in musical consonances as room dimensions to create harmonic spaces, flowing into each other like musical chords (Palladio, Steven Holl), those who believe that music is “design in time” use rhythmic elements of music and apply it to their vertical surfaces and structural grids (Iannis Xenakis, Le Corbusier), those who use architecture as a musical instrument experiment with sound and acoustics to create a phenomenological environment (Bernhard Leitner, Peter Zumthor), those gifted with synethsesia (stimulating one sensory preceptor with another, e.g. seeing colors by listening to music, or vice versa) use certain musical pieces as an inspiration for form generation (Wassily Kandinsky, Steven Holl), and there are those who deconstruct an element in music and reconstruct it to architectural form, highlighting common themes between both arts (Iannis Xenakis, Daniel Libeskind). These five different methods have been the topic of research of many architectural scholars using western music as reference. The question becomes what if the musical reference is changed? Classical, rock, pop, country, jazz, and blues music are very different from one another, yet they share similar foundational musical structures. One may go further and experiment with various world music as reference, which is very different than western music in terms of musical structure. Linguists and musicologists have discussed the origins of music in relation to language. They hypothesize that cognitive elements found in language are somehow carried into the region's music. This paper documents the research of the author in this topic, discussing the digital modelling applications adopted that make such an investigation possible. The interest here is exploring how the visual space is altered when the musical reference is changed, and whether properties of the musical reference are evident in the architectural visualization. The musical references will be limited to Western Classical and Arabic music