Stefano Catena
sound<->space

Abstract

Spatialisation always held a crucial importance in the acousmatic music practice, both live diffused through specialised instruments such as the Acousmonium, but also fixed, composed and crystallised onto a medium. The spatial qualities of a work have become even more important nowadays, with the rise of virtual reality technologies that highlight immersive experiences, or with new industrial standards for spatial audio in cinema (Sergi 2013). Nevertheless, the scholarship behind the use of spatialisation in acousmatic music is undoubtedly underdeveloped, with limited analytical output regarding the compositional use of this parameter, but also the musical reception of listeners – i.e. their spatial experience. This paper discusses the design, results and analysis of a novel iteration of the Intention/Reception project, originally developed by Landy and Weale (Weale 2006), but that focuses only on the interplay between spatialisation and listeners’ reception. The main objective of this qualitative study is to gather information on how listeners interpret and experience spatialisation of multichannel acousmatic works. Data was analysed through the lenses of three main emerging thematic categories: spatial, extra-spatial and emotional. Experimental findings suggest listeners primarily engage with spatialisation in relation to sonic content of multichannel acousmatic music, but also that dramaturgic information can be impactful on both perception and reception of spatialisation. For composers employing multichannel formats and immersive audio systems, these insights confirm the significant implications of perceptual, formal and communicative aspects of spatialisation

Abstract

Today’s field of spatialisation in acousmatic music is very heterogeneous. Composers tend to develop their own technologies and techniques for spatialisation, and often the differences in how multichannel systems are addressed may influence both the musical appreciation and the future reproducibility of a piece. Moreover, the analytical and musicological perspectives of spatialisation are both fragmented and underdeveloped, with a lack of a shared framework for their study. This article focuses on these problems and tries to give a coherent and consistent view of spatialisation practice, from both technological and musicological perspectives. It will also act as a bedrock for the development of the musicological side of spatialisation, an aspect too often overlooked. ‘Spatial reduced listening’ and ‘spatial relativism’ will be introduced as analytical perspectives to shine a light on the composed spatial traits of sound, and not only on its spectromorphological and technological features.

Abstract

This paper aims to foster a discussion over the necessity of developing an analysis and classification framework of the spatial parameter in music, especially within the electroacoustic and acousmatic music contexts. As the exploration of space as an artistic feature is not novel in music, our discourse builds up from a review of the field, investigating its origins and identifying previous key experiences. This paper considers the state of the art of spatial analysis, comparing it with issues currently affecting electroacoustic and acousmatic music musicology, namely the lack of an agreed notation system and the technological fragmentation of the field. The following discussion proposes spatialisation as an experiential feature and recommends a perspective that contrast the dominant philosophy which interprets space from a geometrical and technological perspective. From this novel standpoint, we advocate that spatialisation should be studied independently from the technology employed, focusing only on aural implications. By inviting a conversation on this matter, we also suggest that the proposed perspective could work retrospectively, improving the analysis of electroacoustic pieces belonging to the historical repertoire.

Abstract

While spatial audio technologies have developed dramatically in the last twenty years, the compositional approaches to spatialisation in electroacoustic music are still fragmented. No coherent and shared language for spatialisation exists yet, and it is often challenging to reproduce an electroacoustic piece in different space from the one it was conceived in. In this paper we delve deeper into an approach about spatial audio and spatialisation techniques in the electroacoustic arts that we called 'speaker agnosticism'. By introducing Lilla Salen, a multichannel system of up to 49 speakers in a dome like configuration, and the authors' compositions, we describe a method of treating the concert hall as an instrument irrespective of the number of speakers it contains, or their arrangement. This paradigm shift encourages an 'organic' approach to music spatialisation, steering away from the traditional 'Euclidean' mindset. Finally, this project hints at the possibility of 'touring' pieces: by treating multichannel systems rather as instruments. Thanks to current audio technologies it is possible to 'transcribe' works between concert halls without losing the musical intention.

Abstract

This paper introduces a series of techniques and approaches to algorithmic timbral spatialisation, the real-time processing of audio data and its musical organization in a binaural or multichannel listening space. The intent of the work is to explore different ways for the automated spatialisation of the audio spectrum, especially in contexts of electroacoustic and acousmatic music composition. Typical Digital Signal Processing operations and algorithms will be used in order to create and/or retrieve data for the dynamic positioning of the audio sources. Firstly, in order to describe the processes, the concept of timbral spatialisation will be introduced, describing the compositional interest of such approach. Then the different techniques for data generation will be formalized, describing their “audioparous” process, that is when information regarding musical organization is extrapolated from an audio source. The various approaches to interpretation and usage of the data will be discussed, as well as their implementation in SuperCollider.

Abstract

For the composer and the interpreter of acousmatic music, the ability to place a sound in space has become an essential element in the creative practice. Together with pitch, timbre, intensity and duration, the position of sounds in space determines its role as a whole. Even more, the movement of sound in space allows them to evoke, with the help of the interpreter, representations of physical environments and gestures. The gesture as a source of motion and the movement that follows, allows you to dive fully in the sound environments depicted. The relevance of this aspect has led us to study and to experiment the behavior of a virtual environment, more precisely a Virtual Acousmonium, testing on it various gestures that are part of the tradition repertoire of acousmatic interpretation. The goal is to verify its effectiveness as a compositional tool, as a tool for studying, for the preparation of acousmatic music performances, and as a didactic support for interpretative practice.

Abstract

Distorsione di Massa é un'installazione interattiva che, sotto forma di gioco, permette all'utente di riflettere sul tema delle fake news. Si presenta come una postazione di ascolto, costituita da una sedia e da un tavolo su cui si trova un tablet, posizionata al centro di uno spazio di diffusione sonora quadrifonica. Il gioco é organizzato in livelli, di difficoltá crescente, in cui l'obiettivo é quello di riconoscere una frase musicale che rappresenta una notizia vera. All'inizio di ogni livello viene fatta ascoltare la frase musicale "vera" che, successivamente, viene moltiplicata e le cui copie vengono sottoposte a un processo di distorsione. Passato un lasso di tempo direttamente proporzionale alla difficoltá del livello, viene sbloccata la possibilitá di selezionare, attraverso la visualizzazione delle posizioni delle sorgenti sul tablet, quale tra le voci ascoltate é quella rimasta inalterata.