First, a few bullet points:
- Led Zeppelin's fourth album is notable for a number of reasons, but for our purposes, I'll start with an anecdote from Eric Davis' book on this unnamed album for the 33 & 1/3 series, on the recording of John Bonhan's drums at Headley Grange for When the Levee Breaks:
For the session, Bonham placed his new kit on the floor of a large open stone stairwell [...] Two ambient Beyer M160 stereo mics were then strung up on the two landings above, and then run through a guitar echo unit. As Andy Fyfe puts it, what you hear is not just the drums, but the drums reacting to the acoustic space of the room. But you are also hearing something more uncanny than this: you are hearing the room respond to the drums. The Grange itself awakens [...] (73-74)
I recall reading somewhere -- and I can't find mention of it online -- that John Lennon sang in a closet at Abbey Road while recording a song for the White Album, because his voice would sound different, in a way that could not be replicated in a studio, even with creative mic placement.
Arcade Fire's Neon Bible album was recorded in an abandoned church in the Quebec town of Farnham. One wonders if it would have sounded differently if it had been recorded in a more traditional studio environment.
Enough rock album trivia. The point here is that spaces have specific auditory signatures, and it's not that grand a leap to say that sounds themselves have architectures of their own. We understand intuitively the meaning of a phrase like 'a grand cathedral of sound' or the description of a song as having 'dead space' within it. There's an entire genre of music, of course, known as soundscapes, as well.
Recording the sounds of spaces is a preservationist act, then: with the proper set of tools, and a big enough microphone (or twenty), one could manage to 'record' and then recreate, based on that recording, an entire structure. Imagine you walked into Carnegie Hall, and played a single short tone, and then recorded it as it bounced from wall to wall, off the seats, off the curtains, even subtly playing a piano left out on the stage. These sounds, played back in real time, provide an audio snapshot of the space, the air which sound propagates through, an inverse structure to the building itself.
"Megaqwerty @humblefool You're talking about impulse responses. I haven't heard of anyone using them for architecture, however, just convolution reverb."
Impulse responses are, it turns out, an actually-existing technology that are basically recordings created by the method I speculated about above: setting up a microphone to record a short loud sound in a particular space. (Download the .wav packs to hear various recordings made of a starter gun in specific spaces, including the guy's mouth!) If you crank up the volume (or watch the sound on a stereoscope) you can hear the echos come back. The idea here is that these sound signatures can be used to give sounds, recorded in generic studios or indeed anywhere, the same sonic fingerprint as if they were recorded in someplace else, via a process called "convolution".
So, what we have here is, then, is the actual exportation and marketing of the sound of spaces. Why shouldn't Carnegie Hall license an impulse response of their stage? There's no sacrilege in that, is there? Or, why not reverse the process, and figure out how to extract an impulse response from old recordings? Picture the setting in Pro Tools: "Abbey Road, 1968" -- someone went back and ripped the sonic signature of John Lennon, standing in the studio, belting out lyrics, and now you, too, can stand right there and sing in the same place Lennon did, without actually standing in the same place.
(This line of thought owes a lot to BLDGBLOG, of course.)