Spaces Speak, Are you Listening?: Experiencing Aural Architecture is a dense and technical book about acoustics, punctuated by some really interesting observations. The book is not written for the layman, and even architects will probably find it to be too much. Large parts of it deal not with the design of acoustics in buildings but in building artificial acoustic simulators for recording studios. Another chapter deals with how evolution impacted our hearing. Even as the son of a neuro-ophthalmologist who did his PhD with one of the scholars quoted in the book, Marcus Jacobson, and as someone who thoroughly enjoyed Ed Yong's An Immense World, I found this part fairly tedious. But the book did make some interesting points, so I will focus on them.
The authors argue that acoustic arenas, or areas which are designed to enhance acoustics, are a good indication of the values of a society. Here they make an interesting point about special sounds that are associated with particular areas, what they call soundmarks. Chiming of clocks, firing of cannons, ringing of bells, and factory whistles were all important to social cohesion in a town.
"In many towns, only those individuals who lived within the area of the most important soundmarks were considered citizens of the town." (29)
In the Mishna we here about the blowing of the shofar before Shabbat, certainly a soundmark that one can imagine was on par with the eruv for determining who lived within a city boundary. Halachically, things were never defined this way - eruv, techum Shabbat, sight of the city walls, even walking distance, were the preferred methods of determining city boundaries. Yet Middot does make a point of noting that at least some soundmarks of the Temple were audible in Jericho, and the trumpets were important signifiers both in the Temple and previously in the desert.
In ArchitecTorah I have a chapter that discusses the role of the wooden stage in the Hakhel ceremony. Blesser and Salter make a point about the stage in a concert hall, writing:
"The musicians playing on stage are, by their special location, like a judge sitting on a dais, a politician or lecturer standing at a podium, or a minister preaching from a pulpit. These individuals are deemed to have socially dominant status; their special locations should have acoustics consistent with their dominant status, their relative social prestige. Thus, to symbolize the social relationship, the acoustics of the podium area in a lecture hall should raise the aural status of the speaker, whereas those of the auditorium should lower the aural status of the listeners." (53)
While nothing in rabbinic literature makes it seem like the architecture of the Ezrat Nashim in the Second Temple took acoustics into account, it is possible that it was considered. On the other hand, as the whole Hakhel arrangement was temporary and happened once every seven years, perhaps such concerns were too remote to be worth altering the architecture. Some scholars view the podium for the ceremony as a type of reenactment of Mount Sinai, but I think it is more likely a reflection of what Blesser and Salter describe above, giving the king prominence.
This idea connects nicely with another acoustical reality described by the authors:
"Centuries old traditions dominate modern spaces: a twenty-first century concert hall supports nineteenth-century music, which was composed for seventeenth-century spaces, which themselves were modeled on spaces inherited from yet earlier centuries." (81)
They explain that most societies had existing spaces which they inhabited for generations. The same church (or synagogue) you attend was likely used by your grandfather and his grandfather. Therefore, specific traditions were probably passed on for performances and liturgy which worked with those existing spaces. (I imagine the effect of congregants singing Ein Kitzva to a marching beat.) Regardless of how Hakhel was done in the Temple, it probably developed over multiple shemita cycles and corrected the practice if the acoustics didn't work the previous time, until a working minhag developed. I can imagine a similar practice for other tefillot and possibly shofar-blowing practices as well. I write a bit about this in a chapter on the acoustics of Hakhel in ArchitecTorah.
Later in the book, the authors discuss how culture is used to bind groups together, and how aural culture is part of this as well. (354) No doubt when we share the experience of shofar, or songs, liturgical chanting, the tune of ma nishtana (as occurred the year of Covid-19), we are using sound to bind ourselves together.
I think the most obvious acoustic halacha is with regard to hearing shofar. Blesser and Salter write that:
"The hidden problem with positioning musicians throughout a space is that sound waves move comparatively slowly. Large acoustic spaces produce large delays, which displaces the temporal alignment of music arriving from different locations. Two notes beginning at the same time may arrive at a listener at different times...When an orchestra is large and spread across the stage, the sound delay places a limit on aural synchronization." (166-167)
This is somewhat reflected in Mishnah Rosh Hashanah 3:3-4, which discuss the practice of blowing both shofar and trumpets on Rosh Hashanah and fast days. On Rosh Hashanah, when the mitzvah is to blow shofar, the shofar must start before the trumpets and continue beyond the trumpets' notes. The opposite is true on fast days, when the day is primarily marked by trumpet blasts.
Much of the book talks about the use of artificial (electronic) means to improve acoustics. However, unless one cares to consider the literature on the use of microphones in a synagogue, this is of less relevance. There is, however, some interesting work on performing aural mitzvot using a hearing aid, which has similar application. Fundamentally, there is a difference between a hearing aid and a microphone, since the first still operates with the existing sound and only makes it louder when it reaches the hearer. Microphones and speakers, however, relay the sound electronically from the speaker. As the authors point out:
"The sound produced by a loudspeaker on the back wall of a concert hall, for example, would normally arrive befoer the direct sound from the performance stage because the loudspeaker is closer to the listeners seated in the rear of the auditorium.. Since the earliest sound determines the aurally perceived location, listeners would aurally perceive the source as being behind them." (200)
Overall I found that the book had interesting insights, but these could be found only by wading through long, technical pages that were beyond the purview of regular architects.
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