Sounding Rooms

For some reason, when our upstairs neighbors came home tonight, their footsteps sounded different – as if someone had come up a staircase I didn't know about, only to begin speaking inside a room I'd never known was there, located somehow behind the kitchen wall – which got me thinking.

[Image: From the Secret Chambers and Hiding-Places by Allan Fea].

You've been living in an apartment for almost a year, one of three apartments in an otherwise unremarkable building on a street somewhere in the city. You know the building fairly well; you've had brief glimpses inside the other apartments; and, with neighboring buildings directly on either side, there should be no major architectural surprises in store.
But one day someone new moves in – and the acoustics of the building begin to change.
You're suddenly hearing people walk up and down a staircase whose position in the house should be impossible, and you're picking up conversations that sound as if they're taking place in rooms that simply cannot be there – voices coming through the walls of the closet, or down through the ceiling of a room that's supposed to have no rooms above it.
What is going on? Have your neighbors stumbled on some weird system of rooms that no one else ever knew about – and, if so, should they pay more rent?
Or perhaps someone has moved into an apartment in the building next door – only it acoustically overlaps with yours in strange and unpredictable ways.
It's like something out of Alice In Wonderland, or even Gormenghast. Schrödinger's Cat as retold by Rem Koolhaas: a potentially unreal maze of interconnected architectural spaces enshrouding you on all sides like a halo. Saint Crawlspace.

[Image: Via. As if we could travel infinitely upward through architectural space, mapping a labyrinth of trapdoors].

So you begin an investigation. You even record brief snippets of these murmuring conversations to see if the voices match your new neighbors – after all, you've spoken to them in the building's foyer, and you don't remember them sounding anything like this.
One night a TV seems to be playing – from behind a wall in your bedroom.
It's too much.
Except then you notice that many walls in the house, particularly down in the entry hall, are actually sealed-over doorframes – and some of the doors in your apartment had once simply been hammered right through the old walls. The interior of the house has been rearranged several times, you see – but of course: how else convert a single-family house into a three-apartment complex?
You even find trace evidence in the back of the kitchen cupboard of a staircase that's no longer there.
But you're not hearing ghosts – you don't believe in ghosts. So is some weird new acoustic effect being demonstrated?
It is the rainy season, your best friend points out; maybe all that moisture in the air has somehow changed the way sound travels through the building... You should talk to an architect, he says, or just dig up old plans of the house. Phone your landlord.

[Image: From the Secret Chambers and Hiding-Places by Allan Fea].

Instead, you start knocking on walls, tapping around for hollow spots. You tell yourself after work each day that you'll bob into a hardware store and buy some kind of stud-finder, some technical way to peer through walls, looking for adjacent spaces.
But you never do; you're too tired – and a stud-finder sounds expensive.
You start daydreaming about radar: you will turn around slowly in the center of your bedroom, holding a machine in both hands, recording the electro-acoustic presence of unknown rooms around you.
It'll be like that scene in Aliens, you joke to yourself, except you'll be detecting architectural space.
Perhaps you'll even find a room that moves, you think. A distant but invisible space, approaching.
Radio astronomy in architectural form.

[Image: From the Secret Chambers and Hiding-Places by Allan Fea].

But then it stops. The sounds go away. The conversations cease. There is no more radio hum or late-night TV chatter, and when your neighbors come home from work each night it sounds the way it did before. There are no more hidden stairways. No more unexpected rooms.
And so you think it's all over – till you're hanging a picture one day. Your hammer goes through the drywall, revealing what looks like a newly furnished room, just hanging out back there in the darkness.