Resonant Spaces, The Sound created by Space and the Space created by Sound (original) (raw)

Space Resonating Through Sound

Proceedings of the SMC Conferences, 2008

In this paper we will analyze how the conception of space in music is expanded by the repertoire of sound art, moving from the idea of space as a delimited area with physical and acoustical characteristics, to the notion of site in which representational aspects of a place become expressive elements of a work of art.

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.

Unfoldings: Multiple Explorations Of Sound And Space

2016

This paper describes a long term, collaborative project Sound Spaces. Within this project we creatively investigated various environments and built a collection of artworks in response to material gathered through a number of practical field visits. Our responses were presented in numerous, idiosyncratic ways and took shape through a number of concerted making activities. The work was conducted both in and with the public, allowing participants to inform the creative decisions made throughout the project as well as experiencing the building of the artworks. Within this essay we report on our process, presentation and offer alternative methods for collecting material and presenting representations of space. We describe the many responses made during our time and related these to research concerns relevant to the NIME community. We conclude with our findings and, through the production of an annotated portfolio, offer our main emerging themes as points of discussion.

The Interplay of Music and Architecture: Layering of Sound and Space

A person can see, feel and touch architecture, but what if he / she could hear it too? Imagine an architectural music in which the surfaces, materials, and forms of a space speak directly, alluring the observer even further into affirmation of spaciousness around them, invoking different memories and emotions. Innovative architects and designers across the world are finding inspiration in music to create sound-producing structures. This new composite living sound organisms, inspired by music, aim to heighten our senses and open our minds to the finer details that make up the world around us. As they come active, or alive they reveal their own tones. Now through digital expression / digital technologies, architecture can attain new heights of creative supremacy. The aim of this paper is to explore through an interdisciplinary thinking, connections between aural and architectural / musical and spatial, in order to achieve a better understanding of how space enhances our well-being. The question that arises is, how sound / music influences the atmosphere of space, while in the same time showing that every environment has an aural architecture.

Imagining Space Through Sound

UK and Ireland Soundscape Community Conference: Sound Practice, 16-20 Feb, Dartington, Devon, UK., 2001

Buildings come to exist as sites of memory and imagination. Any built space, whether constructed for habitation or utility, resonates with the human activity that has occurred within it. Our experience of a space is influenced by many things; by knowledge of the functions of the space, by cultural associations, by memory and imagination. The way we experience a space is determined largely by our aural perception of that space. One can be in a room in complete darkness and yet still have a powerful sense of our own physical presence within it, through the sound of footfall, of the voice and even the sound of our our breath. In this paper the author/composer will refer to her work with environmental sound (in the form of installations and electroacoustic composition) and discuss the ways in which sound can be used to enliven our experience and understanding of space. Examples of electroacoustic soundscapes and documentation of installation work (including a recent collaboration with Edinburgh based artist Anne Bevan) will illustrate how the author’s work focuses on the associative power of sound. By juxtaposing disparate sound worlds or by re-contextualising environmental sound, the intention is to focus the aural imagination and to enrich the listener’s experience of space, whether physical or imaginary. The author’s work has a strong preoccupation with old and abandoned spaces, and a fascination with the memories such places evoke and contain. In some ways the work is an attempt to reanimate space and to tap into the resonances of imagination that inhabit old and neglected buildings. Her work can be seen to incorporate various approaches, ranging from installation and soundscape to historical documentation of specific sites. Drawing on the ideas of various writers, the author will place her work in a broader context and reflect upon the issues raised. Gaston Bachelard’s seminal work, ‘The Poetics of Space’, offers a starting point for attempting to describe the impact that our built environment has on our imagination. Bachelard describes the ways in which human imagination and memory are strongly linked to, and shaped by, our physical environment. “Memories are motionless, and the more securely they are fixed in space, the sounder they are‿. Part of the motivation for the author’s work is to exploit the associative richness of specific sites and locations and to create work which engages the imagination in a variety of ways.

A vision of Sound art, architecture and sound practices in the field of Sonic Urbanism

I have been independently organising the curatorial and research project of APO33, which I founded in 1997, in Nantes. The Association defends the sound arts and experimental intermedia practices by providing space for research, pedagogy and public presentation of these practices. I am applying for this post-doctoral position because I find the project has a strong resonance with my own artistic practice and academic research. I would like to have the opportunity to extend my own research on urban sound environments, through this collaboration and in the context of Sonorous cities: Towards a Sonic Urbanism. It would also be important for my own academic research trajectory and artistic development.

Space, sound, and music: using embodied experiences of space to produce multiple and interconnecting experiences of space in acousmatic music

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.

Sound-space: a listener's creative outcome through an acousmatic performance at the Spatial Sound Institute

Text and Performance Quarterly, 2022

This research focuses on the invisible space built by sound as subject of study, developing through a practice-based methodology a creative process during a residency period in the Spatial Sound Institute (SSI), mainly to investigate the sound features of non-existing architectures. The process ended with a performance that invited listeners to experience a deeper awareness of perception for reaching spaces that exceed the limits of physical possibilities. In this sense, active listening becomes fundamental, not only for forming a personal interpretation of this expanded reality, but for creating soundspaces from a performative experience.