ABSTRACT
Every national and regional culture is its own room, a place in which familiarity and habit may make us feel at home and part of an essence of belonging, or conversely excluded and a stranger. In this chapter, the author describes stepping into a room full of sound, and being first aware of the sound rather than the physical space; this is of course a common experience to anyone who relies entirely on sound for their sense of place. He comes to one of the strangest things about rooms of all, because while we acknowledge that they are places of occupation, at another imaginative level, readers may consider that our presence in them does not have to be physical at all. Having begun in the autumn of 2019, and taken for granted the freedom to share space with others, the author considers all those rooms again, and how a global catastrophe sonically changed them.
