Demystifying the Patterns of Local Knowledge: the Implicit Relation of Local Music and Vernacular Architecture

Abstract

The development of novel design output using Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) is becoming an important milestone in the architectural design discourse. With the recent encounter of the computational design realm with the diffusion models, it becomes even easier to generate 2D and 3D design outputs. Yet, the utilization of machine learning tools within design computing domains is confined to generating or classifying visual and encoded data. However, it is critical to evaluate the untapped potentials of machine learning technologies in terms of illuminating the implicit correlations and links underlying distinct concepts and themes across a wide range of technical domains. With the ongoing research project named “Local Intelligence", we hypothesized that the local knowledge of a certain location might be conceptualized as a distributed network to connect different forms of local knowledge. As the first case of the project, we tried to reinstate a commonality between the local music and vernacular architecture, for which we trained generative adversarial network (GAN) models with the visual spectrograms translated from the audio data of the local songs and images of vernacular architectural instances from a defined geography. The two multi-modal GAN models differ in terms of the inherent convolutional layers and data pairing process. The outcomes demonstrated that both GAN models can learn how to depict vernacular architectural features from the rhythmic pattern of the songs in various patterns. Consequently, the implicit relations between music and architecture in the initial findings come one step closer to being demystified. Thus, the process and generative outcomes of the two models are compared and discussed in terms of the legibility of the architectural features, by taking the original vernacular architectural image dataset as the ground truth. © 2023, Education and research in Computer Aided Architectural Design in Europe. All rights reserved.