Designing in Tune

Psychoacoustic research has shown that listeners, even without musical training, can register an out-of-tune interval before they can consciously analyze it. If an analogous mechanism governs how we register proportions in vision, there may be a new way to approach the design of objects. Designers throughout the centuries have grappled with identifying a true proportional system. This essay articulates my thinking behind a reformulation of this enduring question.  

Palladio’s ratios, the Greek orders, the golden section, the Vitruvian module- each has been treated as a set of universal laws: 1:2, 1:√2, 1:1.618. These are all internally consistent relational systems; what makes each system feel proportionally resolved is not a specific ratio, but the fact that every element maintains a consistent proportional relationship to its reference module.

In music, one can tune their instrument to  A = 415Hz (Baroque), A = 440Hz (modern standard) or A = 432 (an alternative tuning in common use). All three sound correct in isolation, yet if played simultaneously they are dissonant. Perhaps then ‘correctness’ was never in the frequency but rather in the relational consistency within  a chosen system.

In the late 17th century, Leibniz and Newton had debates on if space was an absolute container or whether it was constituted by relations between objects. Leibniz had believed the latter, that space itself was made of the relationship between elements.

If proportion is relational rather than absolute, then the reference module similar to the universe can not be chosen autonomously either. The reference then must be derived from the relational field already present. For instance, a cai-fen module transplanted into a Venetian street, both are individually coherent, yet dissonant when merged because each answers to a different frequency the other does not share.

Modernism and tabula rasa decide to create its own frequency and impose it onto a site, producing discord between the natural and manmade world. Consider the contrary: Tadao Ando’s tatami-based module for concrete formwork, they are proportions tuned to the preexisting frequency of the context. In design, there is never an empty canvas; a building must enter a site, a chair with a desk, a TV with a stand. To create true harmony isn’t to design these objects independently of one another.  

Centuries of proportional theories asked which frequency is correct; perhaps the real question was always how a system must tune itself to the frequency always present in its field.

06/2026