ABSTRACT
The designer needs to be sensitive as well to the sound of a room and even to its odors. Reverberation times and other acoustic characteristics are critical, of course, in concert halls, theaters and opera houses. In church interiors, they have brought into being manners of speaking and whole styles of composing, from Gregorian chants to polyphonic music. In our own time, restaurant design is especially concerned with how rooms sound, a noisy room connoting conviviality and popularity, a quieter one presenting a more sedate image. Rasmussen made an interesting case for acoustic variety and also for acoustic verity, the appropriateness of a room's sound to a room's visual character. Although he acknowledged great advances in the manipulation of acoustics, he thought this knowledge was put to poor use. Smell is not unrelated to our other senses, and the designer needs to deal with connotations and associations as well as with more direct information.
