Category: Listening & Reception

Strategies for spatial music performance: the practicalities and aesthetics of responsive systems design

Posted on 1st December 20149th May 2019 by Ricky Graham (Stevens Institute of Technology) & Brian Bridges (University of Ulster)

This article will explore practical and aesthetic questions concerning spatial music performance by interrogating new developments within an emerging hyperinstrumental practice. The performance system is based on an electric guitar with individuated audio outputs per string and multichannel loudspeaker array. A series of spatial music mapping strategies will explore in-kind relationships between a formal melodic syntax model and an ecological flocking simulator, exploiting broader notions of embodiment underpinning the metaphorical basis for the experience and understanding of musical structure.

An alternative approach to 3D audio recording and reproduction

Posted on 1st December 20149th May 2019 by Augustine Leudar (Queen's University)

The following paper provides an overview of an alternative method of recording 3D sound scenes using several separate SD card microphones as opposed to using single multi capsule ambisonic or surround sound microphones. Instructions are provided on how to set the microphones up, appropriate directivity and positioning, and speaker setup for reproduction.

Aural Territories: how phenomenology taught me how to compose electroacoustic spatial music

Posted on 1st December 20149th May 2019 by Frederico Macedo (University of the State of Santa Catarina, Brazil)

In this article I describe the process of creation, performance, and reception of two sets of multichannel pieces - Journey I and II and Night Song I and II - performed as part of Aural Territories: a concert of spatial electroacoustic music. The main philosophical foundation for this experience has been the views on phenomenology as conceived by Merleau-Ponty (2004) and Dufrenne (1973). In these pieces, I explore compositionally three aspects of the interrelationship between sound and space that were fundamental for my theoretical and practical understanding of electroacoustic spatial music: acoustic space, sound spatialisation, and reference.

Audium – sound-sculptured space

Posted on 1st December 20149th May 2019 by Stan Shaff

Audium has established a series of ideas, expanding the layers of controlled sound in space and evolving a paradigm for positioning and listening. Additionally, it has taken a new architectural approach to the performance-space, with a potential for flexibility through a myriad of environmental combinations.

New developments for spatial music in the context of the ZKM Klangdom: A review of technologies and recent productions

Posted on 1st December 20149th May 2019 by Ludger Brümmer, Götz Dipper, David Wagner, Holger Stenschke & Jochen Arne Otto (ZKM | Institute for Music and Acoustics)

The Institute for Music and Acoustics is a production and research facility of the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe. In this paper, we present some general thoughts on spatial music and its implementations as a motivation for our efforts. We outline the development of the ZKM Klangdom, a multi-loudspeaker facility for spatial sound diffusion that aims to provide artists and composers with new possibilities.

Multichannel sound and spatial sound creation at Sporobole: A short account of live performance, studio design, outdoor multichannel audio, and visiting artists

Posted on 1st December 20149th May 2019 by Philippe-Aubert Gauthier (University of Sherbrooke)

The recent history of multichannel audio at Sporobole, an artist-run centre located in Sherbrooke, Canada, is discussed based on a multidisciplinary exercise. The underlying working axes are presented, from the experience of hosting an experimental rock band in an artistic, electroacoustic, and multichannel context, to the centre’s development, which includes a multichannel sound studio in its recently renovated building.

A direct link to the past: nostalgia and semiotics in video game music

Posted on 2nd June 20149th May 2019 by Sarah Pozderac-Chenevey (University of Cincinnati College, Conservatory of Music)

The multimedia nature of video games and the interactivity of the medium create new possibilities and purposes for nostalgia, as Bastion (2011), Fallout 3 (2008), and The Legend of Zelda series (1987 to present) illustrate. In Bastion, composer Darren Korb uses iconic signifiers of nostalgia to create an empathetic response within the player to the in-game character’s longing for a lost world and time. Fallout 3, in contrast, uses the player’s own familiarity with the popular music of the 1930s and ’40s to heighten the destruction of the world after an in-game nuclear war. Finally, The Legend of Zelda series, which made music a major part of its gameplay in Ocarina of Time, uses music indexically and symbolically in Twilight Princess to prompt a nostalgic response within the player that mirrors the response apparently felt by the main character in the game, Link.

Temporality as an analytical approach to minimalist music: Tom Johnson’s An hour for piano

Posted on 1st March 20139th May 2019 by R. Andrew Lee (Regis University, Colorado)

Minimalist compositions thwart most attempts at analysis given their remarkable simplicity; their structure is often deliberately obvious. The experience of a minimalist piece, however, is anything but simple. These compositions encourage the listener to ignore the past and the future, memory and expectation, and explore an extended present.

Time, eternity and the problem of minimal music’s alleged non-linearity in Louis Andriessen’s De Tijd

Posted on 1st March 20139th May 2019 by Maarten Bierns (University of Amsterdam)

This article explores contrasts between time and eternity in Louis Andriessen’s De Tijd from 1981. The music, although inspired by the experience of “complete tranquility”, appears to establish a dialectical opposition between musical elements signifying timelessness and measured time.

Looking inward: La Monte Young, Arvo Pärt, and the spatiotemporal dwelling environment of minimalist music

Posted on 1st March 20139th May 2019 by Sarah C. Davachi (Mills College, California)

There is a thread of epistemic theory connecting the discourse of twentieth-century aesthetics and phenomenology which asserts that works of art open up or disclose a sort of ‘world’, so to speak, as well as an associated view of reality that accords with the subject’s primordial and embodied sense of being.