Rome Thunderdome

[Image: Little Rome Ruins by Bernat Gallemí].

An early burst of thunder woke me up this morning, before a brief wash of rain blew through – but what was extraordinary was that the sound of the thunder didn't pass all at once: it kept opening and echoing, as if moving outward through the city to trace the shapes of piazzas, streets, river banks, and alleyways.
There was a kind of Dopplered geometry to it – an acoustic version of Rome exactly opposite the city's angles and walls. Live here long enough, and perhaps you could even tell when a storm has reached the Campo del Fiori – echolocating yourself amidst urban geography – because the thunder has opened out again, getting louder, or more resonant, only then to dampen itself back in a tight squeeze through surrounding alleyways. The sound moves through the city like a spider.
You might say that thunder could be used here as a kind of horizontal space-detection device. It's urban radar: an acoustic sensing of the city that moves through that city, seeking out cracks and passageways. Only to fill those empty spaces with sound.
A guild of blind mapmakers uses thunderstorms to pursue prehistoric radar cartography.
It occurred to me, though, that every city – or, at least, every city with a different street grid – must react to thunder differently. Urban design becomes a direct sonic engagement with the atmosphere through storms, using the unique form of your city as a precise acoustic frame for the sky.
Could there even be building types that funnel the sound of thunder? Like Athanasius Kircher's talking statues, they would be talking buildings: acoustically activated by thunder for the purpose of public spectacle.
You could actually test people with this: put them blindfolded in different locations during foreign thunderstorms and ask them to deduce where they are from the widening concussions of sound around them.
Moscow, Cairo, Rome, Fez. London, Barcelona, New York. All with their own sonic signatures: you pinpoint an aerial detonation and acoustically trace its spatial after-effects.