The Hum: Sound, Space, and Structural Isolation
Name
Canada-jcanada-MARCH-ARCH-2026-THESIS.pdf
Size
43.45 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
be8bfbd584ca4b5df1fd218a908e570b
Author(s)
Canada, Jabari
Advisor(s)
Urbonas, Gediminas
Date Issued
February 2026
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
This project uses The Hum, a reported low-frequency phenomenon with physiological and psychological effects, as a lens to examine how sound, structure, and communication shape collective experience. By studying how these effects are conditioned by the material behavior of walls and enclosures, and by observing how people gather on platforms like Reddit to interpret their experiences, the project positions architecture as a model for understanding communicative systems. Nesting, layering, and recursion serve as the project’s primary spatial operations. These architectural strategies are reinterpreted as analogues for the procedural and recursive nature of information exchange, where signals are filtered, repeated, and transformed through structural and social frameworks. At the center of the thesis is a short film in which two characters respond to The Hum in distinct ways. The film adopts the physical logic of a building: narratives are nested within narratives, creating a layered cinematic structure that echoes the architecture of acoustically isolated spaces. A full scale installation extends this logic by creating a viewing environment organized through nesting and layering. A decoupled structure and surface system materializes the thesis’s interest in layered assemblies, while a cube within a cube formalizes the act of nesting, making the spatial operations of the film legible in physical space. In a moment when trust in institutions is eroding, new forms of collective meaning arise in surprising places. The Hum reveals how sound, architecture, and media converge to produce emergent social spaces. Through narrative, form, and sound, the project uses cinema and spatial design to explore an acoustic phenomenon that generates belonging in the absence of shared civic space.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Architecture
Terms of Use
In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted
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