The effect of architecture on sound is one that has shaped the development of music itself. Music was and has been composed for specific spaces, and each space has its own acoustic properties. This has been both a conscious, and an unconscious development, and has involved pre-existing as well as constructed spaces.
In a very direct example of the relationship between styles of music and the spaces in which they are heard, David Byrne points out how the drums and chanting of African village songs fit perfectly in an outdoor open space, whereas the melismatic meanderings of Gothic choral music only really work in the acoustic reverb chamber of a stone cathedral. The space shapes the style of music and the delivery of its content; the culture then works within that, but only secondarily. When music evolved from religious worship and began to be recognised as an art form in itself, the composer wrote for the space in which it would be heard simply because that would be the only place that it would be heard.
Yet curiously before even this, natural spaces had a hand in shaping what would even become to be known as 'music'. According to many in the field of acoustic archeology (aka: 'archaeoacoustics'), before even a conscious collaboration between sound and space: natural design played a part in the shaping of ritual and culture that led to musical practice. The echoing, reverberant cave spaces where tribes gathered for shelter and then socially, had acoustic properties that inspired and encouraged tribal rituals, and hence allowed an emerging culture to develop. Cave painting and visual cave art are often found in cave spaces where unique acoustic properties abound - often relating to the image itself: for example a bird image in a place where there is a flutter echo effect.
Therefore since the dawn of civilisation, the space, the sound, and of course the technology facilitating architecture have always been inextricably linked.
