Syllabus: An Archi-Musical Reimagination of the Belltower Typology

Abstract

As music and architecture faculty at the University of Michigan, Tiffany Ng and Jacob Comerci piloted a week-long interdisciplinary workshop that brought carillon students from varied majors together with architecture students. Over the course of five evenings and a weekend in October 2019, interdisciplinary student teams created visual and sonic prototypes that radically reimagined the bell tower typology and its relationship to public soundscapes and participatory audiences. This rapid approach of teaming up students from distant departments to generate new ideas and to exhibit them in unfamiliar ways resulted in learning outcomes not achievable through typical music and architectural programs. Likewise, during the final "science fair"-style dialogical critique, we and the invited jurors found that the students' pairing of sonic representations with architectural renderings added unique immersive and narrative value to the visual, opened up senses of space, sonically illustrated connections between spaces, enhanced impressions of localized subjective experiences, and added immediacy.