# Space within Space- Artificial Reverb and the Detachable Echo JONATHAN STERNE **Abstract:** ed sounds-in-themselves from the lived experience of hearing subjects. This new construct, which for convenience I will call the “detachable echo,” meant that the two terms—sound and reverberation—no longer had any necessary, given relationship. A cathedral could sound echoless, even dead; a tiny enclosed space like a car could sound cavernous. This restricted definition of sound, based in the idea that reverberation is supplemental to an essentially spaceless sound, remains a dominant construct to the present day. This logic is at work in many places, from visually grand and Grey Room 60, Summer 2015, pp. 110–131. © 2015 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00177 by guest on 05 May 2021 111 surprisingly quiet entrance halls at corporate headquarters to THX-certified movie theaters.2 Detached and detachable echoes can be found in fields of practice as diverse as architectural acoustics; speech and hearing science; soundtrack mixing for film, television, and videogames; sound art installations; signal processing for telecommunications; and production practices for live and recorded music. Thompson’s narrative has two stages: first, architectural acousticians separated sound and space and privileged a single-best sound; later, in the mid-twentieth century, that dominant aesthetic was shattered. Thompson writes that by the end of the nineteenth century architectural acousticians were work **Authors:** [[Detachable Echo]]