Sound Recordings, Concert Halls, and the Politics of Live Music Listening

From Los Angeles to Paris, from Shanghai to Hamburg, architectural acoustics have defined the live music experience of classical music for more than one hundred years. Using as a case study Hamburg’s recently built Elbphilharmonie (2017), the concert hall is viewed as a contemporary listening environment dedicated to the fetishization of acousmatic music listening, whereby live music is heard as a sound recording. The exaggerated claim of “perfect acoustics” by Yasuhisa Toyota, the famed acoustician of the Elbphilharmonie, is of concern here as such a presumption of a sonic ideal in live music listening is based on a patented soundscape similar to that found in a recording studio. Thus, in this instance, one starts to understand that even in a live music performance, the concert hall is a reflection of the contemporary politics surrounding accuracy and truth in today’s media.