Understanding Spatial Experience Through Background Noise: Enactive Listening Account

Abstract

This thesis questions the potential use of listening practices for spatial explorations in architecture. For this reason, listening is considered a perceptual/sense-making cognitive experience. While the intended investigation is dedicated to the spatial experience of listening, background noise conception is taken as the fundamental notion for problematizing spatial experience in the context of everyday life. The required cognitive approach for this exploration is grounded on the Enacted Mind Thesis as a research method to reach perceptual experiences. Within these considerations, this study aims to intersect the conceptual extensions of enactive account spatial experience in listening to background noise and the obtained results from the conducted case study experiment for the listening experience. One of the reasons is to propose an approach to speculate architectural discourses on the ground of spatial experience. Because, although the cognitive relationship between body and environment is such a fundamental matter for architecture, the given value for the spatial experience’s ambiguous plurality in architecture practices and studies is always open for discussion. However, this study does not interest in discussing these discourses. Instead, referring the background noise conception to this ambiguous side of the experience holds any expected speculations for architectural discourses on the conceptual level. On the other hand, it proposes a research method for reaching the spatial experience of listening to a noisy urban environment, it questions the potentials of the method for revalinf the plurality, instead of politicizing the urban experience.