Round the World in Sixty Minutes: approaches to the evocation of space, place and location in recent multichannel works (original) (raw)
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ACTES PROCEEDINGS, 2000
Many different spaces coexist and interconnect for any listener to music played over speakers or other means where there is no visible source of the sound. These spaces could include the physical space of the concert hall, a representation of space conceived in the perceived knowledge of the social practice of people getting together to listen to music in groups; the social space of the listeners; the virtual space of the piece of acousmatic music; the representation of perceived, conceived or lived space in the piece; as well as the representational space of the sound work and the mental space the individual listener inhabits while listening, a space that is possibly unique to sonic experience. In this paper I shall discuss how these spaces are produced and coexist; how our embodied experiences of space can be used to produce new means of representation and new forms of expression through the production of space in sound works; and investigate spatial mimesis as a new area of discourse in sonic art.
Space and place in world music production
City, Culture and Society, 2015
Space and place are central to understanding the conditions of world music production. This article examines how three world-music venues generate particular imaginaries, identities and expectations for those involved: performers, consumers and promoters. These venues form part of a city's nighttime economy and as such they are replete with and reenact the spatial-cultural dymanics of their location. Drawing on interview data and participant observation I show how live performances create new tensions between the global and the local, in part, through spatialized interactions among social actors, representations of world music, and constructions of place and identity through the venues themselves.
Space and Place: Sonic Thoughts, Tensions, and Trajectories
Serendipity Arts Foundation: Projects / Processes Volume I, 2020
A slow but inevitable foregrounding of sound in sensorial, material, and conceptual domains over the second half of the twentieth century, has unfolded in art, literature, and the humanities, not to mention popular culture. Often referred to as the “sonic turn”, a shifting of cultural markers and practices that the scholar Christoph Cox describes as “a broad turn in the academy and also in visual and sonic arts”1, it carried the legacy of a century of theory and practice, during which the plastic arts flourished, and conventions of music and musical performance were challenged vigorously by a wide range of stakeholders.
The Parameter of Space: Can Instrumental and Acousmatic Music Share the Same Approach to Space?
The attempt to arrive at common solutions to space in acousmatic and instrumental music may be beneficial in two ways: to generate approaches to spatialisation in mixed pieces, and to break up views that may seem incontestable within only one of the two domains. Building on the basis that the increased importance of spatial audio reflects a fundamental aesthetic evolution of contemporary art music, this paper presents a comparative study of approaches to space in electroacoustic and instrumental music. Compositional techniques are examined with reference to their deployment of space, both those that distinguish the acousmatic domain from the acoustic, and others that demonstrate the crossing over between the two domains. A discussion about space as a musical parameter explores resulting implications for electroacoustic and instrumental music.
Space, Sound, and Acousmatic Music The Heart of the Research
Die frühe elektroakustische Musik und ihre Kontexte
The spatial projection of music for acousmatic listening-the sound in spaceenables the space of the future to open up to a fifth dimension of expression in music: the space of sound. The listening conditions of acousmatic music (with no real established sound source) approach those of a blind person, who senses space by close listening to the acoustic qualities of his or her physical environment. The ›eyes closed‹ approach abolishes the physical limits of the performance space, and it allows the imagination to deploy its spatial sensations. Species of Spaces: The Four Main Spatial Categories Four categories of space emerge from this particular practice of interpretation and knowledge of the acousmatic repertoire: (1) the ›ambiophonic‹ or ›surround space‹ immerses the listener in a ›bath‹ of sound; as opposed to (2) the ›sound source‹ space, in which sounds may be localized; (3) the ›geometry space‹ in a work structures planes and volumes; and (4) ›space illusion‹, works in the traditional stereo format. The first three categories relate mostly to multichannel recordings. In contrast, the fourth category, the traditional stereo form, creates both a phantom sound source (possibly moving) and an illusion of spatial depth across the distance of two loudspeakers, regardless of whether that depth is consciously perceived as such. This sonic image resembles a film that displays spatial depth in the central perspective format on a screen. 1a-Ambiophonic Space A space is termed ambiophonic if we cannot determine where sounds come from, so that the auditor is bathed in a diffused ambiance. Listening achieves a ›mixing‹ of all events hinted at. One can draw an analogy to Byzantine churches: these include domes covered with gold tesserae, which redistribute what little ambient light there is equally across the whole church, but the source cannot be localized.
Spatiality and Immersiveness in Acousmatic Music
Realidad de la virtualidad / Virtualidad de la realidad, 2021
Spatiality and Immersiveness in Acousmatic Music is the written account of an interview by Edmar Soria in early 2021. It was published as a book chapter in Realidad de la virtualidad / Virtualidad de la realidad (2021, Mexico). In the interview, I discuss spatiality, virtuality and immersivity from my compositional aesthetic perspective.
Materialising Time and Space within Acousmatic Music (Joint paper with Stephen Kilpatrick)
L'espace du Son III, Musique et Recherches, Belgium, 2011
The intention of this paper is to discuss space in acousmatic music from a phenomenological perspective. It will argue that space, and our spatial experience, is radically dependent upon intentional acts of consciousness and thus, to some extent, listener dependent. It will go on to demonstrate that intentional acts are not uniform; different sound materials invoke different kinds of intentionality and, for this reason, space in acousmatic music is heterogeneous. The paper will begin by identifying different sorts of intentional acts and consider the role they play in the construction of our spatial experience. Following this, we will introduce Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope and, taking this as a point of departure, provide some much needed terminology to facilitate spatial discourse.
Space: The Common Denominator in Acousmatic Music
Musimédiane, 2015
This article, Space : The Common Denominator in Acousmatic Music, was published online in 2015 in the 8th edition of the French multimedia review, Musimédiane, which is dedicated to music analysis and theory. The article is based on research conducted in two phases. The first phase is a study of the listening strategies for electroacoustic music, and centers on the strategies proposed by François Delalande. The second is a new theoretical framework for listening strategies for acousmatic music that I developed in my doctoral dissertation, Materials, Meaning and Metaphor : Unveiling Spatio-Temporal Pertinences in Acousmatic Music (City, University of London 2011), which is designed to assist the composer and the listener in the elaboration of meaning for an acousmatic work. In this article, I address one of two common denominators identified as carriers of poietic intention and esthesic perception: space, which is considered from the perspective of the four listening strategies that have emerged in my new theoretical framework: sonic properties, structural attributes, self-orientation, and imaginary realms. In order to aid the reader, the abstract for my doctoral dissertation and a resumé of the research on which my dissertation is founded introduce the article. Additionally, I retained the original text layout designed for Musimédiane since key phrases, which are translated into French by Nicholas Marty for the aid of the French-speaking reader, appear on the right side of the text. If you would like to listen to the sound examples, please refer to the version of this article on the Musimédiane website: https://www.musimediane.com/8anderson/
When listening to specific musical compositions in which physical space is employed with an aesthetic role, we can hear sound sources` spatial properties in the same way as we do it in the case of environmental sound sources. In this essay, I will expand the application of a model for the spatial experience of sound sources to the experience of listening to the musical sound sources of two musical compositions by the Italian composer Luigi Nono. In order to do that, I will briefly summarize how we experience sound sources` spatial properties in the case of environmental sounds; I will then mention the different kinds of physical space which we might be able to hear in the case of musical listening, and I will finally analyze Luigi Nono's "Hay que caminar" soñando (1989) for two violins and La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura (1988) for solo violin and 8-track tape to show how the model of the experience of environmental sound sources applies also to these musical cases. keywords musical sound, environmental sound, spatial perception, music, aesthetic experience, sound
“Map Song”: Poetic Intersections Between Sound, Maps, and Performance
Borderlines: Essays on Mapping and The Logic of Place, 2019
Map Song is a live sound performance that I created and performed at Hansen House, a former lepers' hospital in Jerusalem. It explored the borderlines and relationships between sounds, maps, and the performative arts. In a reflexive critique of my own artistic work, I examine a number of performative acts of mapping through soundthe sound-recorded walk, the sacred Songlines of the Australian Aboriginals, and the vocal navigation instructions of GPS devices. By shifting between artistic practice and theoretical analysis, my presentation brings out the relationship and interaction between sound and maps, which oscillate between cooperation and resistance. At the same time, this process illuminates the bonds between orientation and memory. This movement opens up new poetic possibilities of telling spatial stories through sound in a way that reflects upon the effect of contemporary location-based technologies on