Three criteria for a natural-sounding room can be distilled from Patte’s treatise: uniformity, audiovisual

coordination, and intimacy. First, performances should sound the same from every seat. Many French
theatre critics had complained about halls where the performance was barely audible beyond the front
rows. In a good theatre, Patte explained, ‘not only would everyone be able to see the entire stage and all
the set decorations, but the actors, with no need for great vocal efforts, would be heard uniformly by
everyone: their voices would be supported in every corner, and would always seem full and sonorous.’

Second, Patte observed that a theatre building had a ‘dual objective’ to facilitate audiences seeing and
hearing the performance. While he analysed acoustics and sightlines separately, he believed that, with
proper coordination, both criteria could be satisfied. This was not a self-evident proposition. One critic
had grumbled that in most French theatres ‘the best place for vision [was] the worst for hearing, and
vice versa’. Patte understood that, while the audience looked directly at the stage, much of the sound
they heard reached their ears only after bouncing off the hall’s interior surfaces. If the various perceptual
design considerations were not properly resolved, there might be seats where one could hear actors’
voices but not tell where the sound came from, observe actors’ gesturing without catching the dialogue,
or perceive sounds as coming from the wrong location.

A final concern for Patte was that if sound were not reflected in the proper way, it would seem ‘thin and
exhausted’ and would lack ‘intimacy’. For him, an acoustically intimate hall was one where performers
‘could maintain the tone of an ordinary conversation and none of it would be lost’. In other words,
audience members sitting amid the vast commercial apparatus of a Parisian theatre should still feel they
were receiving the sound of a performance individually, as if the actors were right in front of them. This
ideal of intimate sound was eventually inherited by the 20th- and 21st-century music industry. In popular
music especially, the combination of close mic recording and the use of stereo headphones often
heightens listeners’ sense of being in the immediate presence of the performers. Meanwhile, in the
design of concert halls for orchestral music, intimacy is prized more than ever as the acoustic holy grail.

Patte’s design strategies for improving theatre acoustics failed. His main suggestion – shaping the theatre
as a perfect ellipse, so sound would bounce off the curved walls in an orderly way – proved totally
inadequate. When a massive theatre built on this premise opened in Berlin in 1802, it was widely
criticised for a distracting echo. Gradually, acoustic design became more empirically grounded, and
designers realised that the sound of a theatre – or any other kind of building – depends on numerous
factors that Patte had barely considered, including the size of the hall and the materials it is made of.
Then, around the turn of the 20th century, the practice of acoustics was transformed by the rise of
scientifically trained consultants, the invention of new sound-absorbing building materials, and audio
engineers’ efforts to evoke virtual spaces in recorded sound. The historian Emily Thompson argues that
these developments reinforced one another to establish a new regime of ‘modern sound’.
Nevertheless, for all these important technical and cultural changes, the imperative to make architecture
sound natural remains essentially unchallenged. In the 1960s and ’70s, for example, with the expansion
of open-plan offices, engineers were at pains to make them sound like offices ought to sound. ‘Every
space should have an acoustical environment that is natural to the activity of the organisation that
occupies it,’ advised the furniture company Herman Miller. The company suggested that office workers
be carefully arranged so the sounds they each produced would complement one another. The objective
was to create a pervasive ‘activity bustle’ in which a sense of ‘“who we are, what we are doing” is
preserved and communicated’.

We want to forget that sound is mediated, and to imagine that we are communicating directly and
naturally

Occasionally there have been creative experiments aimed at disrupting acoustic naturalism. One of the
earliest movies to defy the emerging conventions of cinematic sound was Under the Roofs of Paris
(1930), the first sound film by auteur director René Clair. At one point, the camera peers into a tavern
through a glass storefront when a girl runs inside to convey some urgent news. We briefly hear sounds
from inside the bar, but only for the split second the door is open. After it closes behind her, we see the
girl’s excited gesturing but can only guess at what she says. In another scene, as two men fight on a
street corner at night, the camera follows the brawl closely but the sound is drowned out by a
serendipitously passing train. As the train chugs into the distance, another character shoots out the
streetlight; suddenly the sensory channels are reversed, and we can hear the fight scene but without
seeing it. Such startling effects defamiliarise the film’s soundtrack, drawing attention to it as an
autonomous element. Gestures like this are rarely crowd-pleasers. Despite the popularity of Under the
Roofs of Paris, Clair’s challenge to the emerging Hollywood consensus around auditory naturalism was
largely ignored by later filmmakers.

Architecture, too, has sometimes challenged acoustic norms in order to produce powerful spatial effects.
In 1958, the Philips electronics company sponsored a pavilion at the World’s Fair designed by the
architect Le Corbusier to demonstrate its new electronic systems for modifying a room’s acoustics.
Through the dynamic simulation of reverberation and other effects, the pavilion was ‘to seem at one
instant to be narrow and “dry”, and at another to seem like a cathedral,’ as a Philips engineer put it.
These effects were applied to a jarring eight-minute piece by the avant-garde composer Edgard Varèse
that remains a landmark of electroacoustic music. Le Corbusier hoped that the pavilion’s use of sound
technology would encourage architects’ broader experimentation with acoustics, but its influence has
largely been confined to the more rarefied world of sound art installations.
The foregrounding of acoustic artifice thus remains the exception rather than the rule. Something deeply
rooted in modern culture makes us want to forget that sound is mediated, and to imagine that we are
communicating directly and naturally. Writing about movie soundtracks, the theorist Michel Chion
argues that an instinctive desire to believe in ‘human unity, cinematic unity, unity itself’ compels us to
resolve a film’s image and its sounds into an integral representation of space. This urge seems to grow
only more powerful as communication becomes more mediated. Recently, the production of natural-
seeming audio has become a key area of research and development for videoconferencing software. It
won’t be enough to eliminate the bizarre echoes, background noises and sound-image disjunctions that
still frequently haunt online meetings: the goal is to produce a fully convincing ‘virtual’ acoustic space.

As long as such platforms are measured against the acoustic norms of physical spaces, they will be
dogged by the same contradictions that first emerged in 18th-century theatre design. How can demands
for clearer sound be satisfied when they conflict with the naturalistic ideal? How much ‘artificial
naturalness’ can listeners tolerate before the reality effect breaks down? What happens when perceptual
standards evolve and yesterday’s natural sound rings false to today’s listeners? Ultimately, the acoustic
vexations of spatial environments – whether the spaces are real or virtual – are not empirical problems
to be solved by technology, but philosophical tensions stemming from the dream of unmediated,
uninhibited exchange that haunts modern communication.