Places with historic significance have traditionally been understood in such a visually oriented way that knowing their value through other senses has been widely overlooked. What you see — a cornice, brickwork bonds, bare concrete — has long held the most weight when describing and characterizing architectural heritage. Yet experiencing places involves not just seeing but smelling, touching, tasting, and hearing, too. These perceptions aren’t merely echoes of the way places look — they’re distinct dimensions of their existence, without which dynamic engagement with varied pasts and presents is tricky.
Pamela Jordan’s work explores precisely that multidimensionality. An American architect and sonic heritage practitioner at the University of Amsterdam, she specializes in the role sound plays in the lives of historic places, one equal and different to that of bricks and mortar.
Jordan has studied sonic heritage qualities at sites including the Berlin Wall and the Ancient Sanctuary of Zeus at Mount Lykaion and is the co-editor of New Sensory Approaches to the Past (UCL Press, 2025). In October 2025, she teamed up with ERA to conduct sonic heritage assessments of East Gwillimbury’s Sharon Temple and the conservatory at Toronto’s Allan Gardens.
ERA cultural critic Alessandro Tersigni sat down with Jordan to discuss how sound differs from other heritage qualities, the ways heritage professionals can conserve sound, and what it was like bringing her expertise to these sites.
Alessandro Tersigni: We’re used to thinking of heritage as a physical phenomenon that’s generally understood by sight. How do you think considering sound changes our relationship to heritage?
Pamela Jordan: Paying attention to sound certainly allows for a different kind of engagement with places of historic or heritage significance. When processes that are usually preconscious— perceiving noise or silence, registering the size of a room by its echo, hearing that something is approaching before it is seen — become conscious, our awareness of ourselves in a place blooms, and sound becomes this connective tissue linking us to past realities in new ways. It can be just as strong evidence of the continuity of the built environment as ocular-centric aspects like brick patterns and light qualities.
AT: What does a sonic heritage specialist do?
PJ: Sonic heritage is a very specific consideration that currently gets limited attention in historic spaces. Acoustics are usually something you bring in a specialist for, a matter of material treatments, often long after the early phases of a project’s design. As a sonic heritage specialist, I use sound as a way to understand the full continuity of the place. There’s a valuable opportunity in authorized heritage discourses and frameworks to start connecting sound and silence to the health, group dynamics, and significances of spaces over time. That would be one way to apply a sonic heritage lens. In my work, I approach sound and heritage a bit more fluidly and go between disciplines. Any one approach rarely has all the answers.
AT: What are some fluid ways of understanding sonic heritage?
PJ: I consider sound in historic spaces in two main contrasting ways. As an architect, I can’t help but understand sound as a direct manifestation of a space’s physicality, materiality, and geometry. At the same time, sound is also absolutely an expression of the actions, practices, and culture carried out in that space. There’s a tension there: sound is both material and immaterial. We measure it by its duration, so concepts of continuity are already built in. Our discipline hasn’t really come up with adequate language yet to fully discuss that kind of complexity. In the meantime, I’ve been developing the term “sonic diversity” to talk about the need, in my opinion, for a built environment with an intentional mixture of different sonic experiences — echo patterns, sound absorption, and zones of varying characters in which you can literally hear the difference when moving through a historic space.
AT: We intuitively understand the aesthetic heritage of a stained-glass window. Do you think Sonic Heritage has aesthetic value in the same way?
PJ: How we view aesthetics changes over time and is tied up in huge, diffuse forces like class, context, and social norms. Two well-established frameworks for the aesthetic value of sound are musical aesthetics, which are extremely intentional, and the idea of “soundscapes,” which comes from the work of R. Murray Schafer and others, and is informed by romantic and picturesque visual references. Neither of those pushes the boundaries of sonic diversity, let’s say. The rest of our sonic experiences, which account for most of the time and space we inhabit, especially regarding architectural encounters, are often aesthetically overlooked unless a particularly dramatic sound or silence occurs. If we could cultivate an aesthetic engagement with that great diversity of sonic qualities and conditions, a set of possibilities and preferences, I think we would find heritage value in that.
AT: What kind of other values might sonic heritage have?
In my work, non-aesthetic sonic experiences have been a powerful engagement tool for understanding heritage. When I was researching sound at the Berlin Wall, I found that the exact same sonic conditions meant different, even opposing, things to different people at different points in history. Silence in East Berlin during the Cold War, for instance, was a sign of surveillance, whereas today it might be desirable as a sonic reprieve in the same urban environment. All these kinds of associations, good and bad, are important for understanding the history, substance, and value of places that we can experience through sound.
AT: Tell me about the sonic heritage projects you undertook with ERA at Sharon Temple and the Allan Gardens Conservatory.
PJ: Those projects were fascinating and so different from each other. (Thank you to Katie Lee and Julie Fish for their wonderful collaboration!) Our main insight at Sharon Temple was about the power of association in determining the experience and meaning of sound there. Technically speaking, it didn’t seem like there was anything sonically unusual happening in Sharon Temple. But clearly, the association that has developed over two centuries of use between that building and a particular acoustic identity is, in fact, extraordinary. Such a perceptual continuity must hold space next to technical findings.
As an example, Sharon Temple’s second-floor musicians’ gallery has a reputation for amplifying performances taking place for those down on the main floor. While this isn’t technically true from the measurements I analyzed, there is more to the story. The geometry of the design, paired with the isolation of the performers in this area, means that the source of the music was always hidden from the audience’s view. This could heighten the perceived presence of the music for those below and make its directionality and distance especially meaningful and symbolic.
The more time we spent in the Temple, the more such meta-sonic characteristics arose and activated our immediate relationship with the building. Big sound sources like the sound of the organ bellows ricocheting around the building, little things like the dampened clink of the door latch, even the way that outside sound was dampened in the quiet interior — all these sonic artifacts start to come together, until suddenly you think, “Many people have heard these same things through time — what were all the meanings they found in them?”
AT: What sonic insights did you have at Allan Gardens?
PJ: Allan Gardens is fascinating because it has so many different personalities, including sonic ones, that work together to define the place as a whole. It’s a good example of sonic diversity that I think holds value for the neighbourhood. One impression that I got from both conducting a public survey and spending time there myself was that you can create the experience of silence by introducing sound. This contradiction has everything to do with calibrated contrast. The Orchid House, for example, is full of the steady, dominant sound of water splashing on a small water wheel inside, which is loud enough that you can’t hear the rest of the park with its traffic, construction, and human activity, but which cannot be heard outside of the building. Because of that one sonic cue in the space, you suddenly perceive the environment as very quiet and isolated, even though technically it’s quite loud and physically integrated within the park. People have such complex, positive associations with water and living plants. Coupled with the other sensory cues of humidity and sunlight, the sounds of Allan Gardens produce an unlikely feeling of seclusion in the middle of the inner city that could easily be compromised by a change in sonic character.
AT: How would you conserve those sonic qualities as heritage?
PJ: The first approach is to document the current conditions to understand what is remnant of the past. There are many different methods for this, from interviews to technical measurements. Next would be understanding that your engagement with sound reactivates a place and provides the opportunity to reinterpret and revivify it. In my view, conserving the exact sonic elements is less important than maintaining the relationship between people and place that is expressed through sound. Just like an architect’s toolbox for restoring or preserving the built environment, sonic heritage conservation makes use of many different tools to accomplish this. From that standpoint, conservation is the same whether it’s sound or brick.
AT: Where do you think the practice of sonic heritage is headed?
PJ: Long-lived cities, like Toronto, have a strong sense of identity based on their visual environments and the value their populations generally recognize in them. People can identify what they want to remain intact. We don’t have a system like that when it comes to what a city sounds like, even though it informs so much of our constant experience of a place. There’s an opportunity to use conversations about how sonic environments make people feel to explore how they consider those places to be unique and meaningful in new and rich ways. We’re currently in a moment when ideas of intangible heritage are being re-examined by a new generation, and sonic approaches to heritage could find greater purchase. I’d love to see sonic heritage transcend being simply a hypothetical or academic pursuit and hold as much currency as conserving a stone wall.
Read Pamela Jordan’s Sonic Heritage Study on Sharon Temple and Allan Gardens.
