Insights through spatial visualization of the compositional decisions regarding auditory perception in a hemispherical loudspeaker array
(2025)
author(s): Jakob Gille
published in: Research Catalogue
This research explores the crucial role of spatialisation within electroacoustic composition through a detailed analysis of a section of the author's work 'Motion', composed in 5th order Ambisonics for hemispheric loudspeaker arrays. It focuses in particular on how spatial analysis tools can reveal perceptual relationships that traditional spectral analysis alone cannot adequately capture. While spectral analysis provides invaluable insight into timbre and frequency content, it cannot show the dynamic interplay of sound sources in a three-dimensional environment. As spatialisation profoundly influences how listeners perceive individual sound events, their interactions and the overall coherence of a composition within a given acoustic space, the analysis of it is even more important.
The author also draws on the importance of analysing spatialisation to provide insights that are otherwise not easily understood. One of the many challenges faced by a composer working with multichannel audio is the uncertainty of the actual loudspeaker configuration of the concert space. A spatial analysis of immersive electroacoustic works can provide insights into how these problems can be addressed through compositional decisions based on auditory perception. Such analysis can help composers to anticipate potential problems arising from different room acoustics or listener positions, ultimately leading to a more consistent and effective listening experience in different venues.
Linked to this, the research provides an overview of auditory perception within hemispheric reproduction systems, building on Kendall's framework that "listeners experience electroacoustic music as full of meaning and significance, and they experience spatiality as one of the factors contributing to its meaningfulness". Drawing on Bregman's auditory scene analysis, specifically stream segregation, the analysis thus focuses on how spatial techniques can address masking effects through spatial separation, as discussed also in Brümmer's work on the decomposition of sound material through spatialisation.
By combining multiple analytical perspectives in the form of spectral analyses, contextualised with spatial analysis tools, this research aims to provide new insights into the relationship between spatial composition and auditory perception in contemporary electroacoustic composition, contributing to the growing body of knowledge on spatial perception and compositional practice in immersive audio environments.
Embodied/Encoded: A Study of Presence in Digital Music
(2024)
author(s): Robert Seaback
published in: Norwegian Academy of Music
Presence in Embodied/Encoded is concerned with the physical and embodied dimensions of musicking in relation to digital-informational representations of such phenomena. I explore presence through practices of recording, creative coding, audio production, and spatial electronic music composition. Of particular interest is the link between presence and the sensual/corporeal aspects of sound production and listening. Research in embodied music cognition and extended reality provide a foundation for this type of meaning formation.
In the context of immersive electronic music, I suggest that physical presence – a sense of ‘being somewhere’—emerges not just from images/representations of place, but from peripheral aspects of the (embodied) acoustic experience such as spatial proximity and distance, diffuseness, resonance and reverberation, noise floor, etc. Consequently, musical meaning in “Embodied/Encoded” moves away from the symbolic dimension of electronic sounds toward meaning as an outcome of embodied interaction with the environment. The concept of presence can also apply to ‘mixed’ music, or combinations of acoustic and electronic sources, in which virtual presence is complicated by real bodies and spaces.
Digital technology renders sound a flexible, malleable entity—a ‘flickering’ signifier to borrow from Hayles—capable of reconfiguring presence in creative ways. The dance between encoded and embodied dimensions inspires and informs this artistic research. Through a body of immersive music and multimedia documentation, I unpack connections between presence and its digital abstractions.
Listening Into the Lattice
(2024)
author(s): Jorge Boehringer
published in: HUB - Journal of Research in Art, Design and Society
This exposition details the opening phase of new research between an experimental sound artist and an archaeologist, with a detailed examination of critical epistemological questions that have arisen from the beginning of this project. Both collaborating researchers are situated within hybrid specialisations. As the project unfolds, archaeo-chemical data is explored and animated through methods developed from intersections of data science and musical practice, resulting in performance and installation environments in which knowledge of material culture of the ancient past may be made present through listening. However, beyond a case study, this exposition points to how interdisciplinary artistic work produces results that have value outside of normative paradigms for any of the fields from which it is derived, while offering critical insight about those fields. This exposition is formed of these insights. Readers are introduced to the structure of the data, its relationship to the materiality of the artefacts described, the technological apparatus and compositional methodology through which the data is sonified, and the new materiality of the resulting artistic experiences.
Sonification exists at a nexus of sound production and listening, interwoven with information. Meaning and interpretations arise from artistic decisions concerning sound composition and the context for listening to take place. Meanwhile, listening teaches us about data and about the physical and cultural spaces into which we project it. In this way, sonification is always already interdisciplinary.
Mouvance. Approaches to re-enacting medieval music
(2020)
author(s): Jostein Gundersen, Ruben Sverre Gjertsen, Alwynne Pritchard
connected to: SAR Conference 2020
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
This exposition presents three approaches to re-enactment of medieval musical ideas, as explored through the artistic research project Wheels within Wheels. New approaches to interactions between performers and composers. The research project took place at the University of Bergen, Faculty of Art, Music and Design, Grieg Academy – Department of Music, from 2015 to 2018 under the auspices of the Norwegian Artistic Research Programme. The project led to three concerts and a sound installation. This exposition presents documentation of the results and gives an account of the research materials, tools and work methods, as well as discussing ethical and aesthetical dimensions of the working processes and the results.
Spontaneous Music Diffusions
(last edited: 2026)
author(s): Giuseppe Pisano
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
The title of my doctoral research, "Spontaneous Music Diffusions," frames a journey that begins and ends in the narrow alleys of Naples's old town. Starting with examples of local pop music resonating in the street, and landing on a critical examination of how tourism shapes the city's acoustic environment.
Through the project, my research path diverged in multiple directions. Engaging with established scholar traditions and composition paradigms, i felt the necessity of deconstructing and rearticulating my practice as a field recordist and composer, a transformative process that has produced substantial academic and artistic results, and that remodulated my outputs into a multifaceted and interdisciplinary network.
POWER AMBISONICS
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Giuseppe Pisano
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This page has the purpose of collecting in one place all the educational material about ambisonics and spatial audio that I have gathered through the years, and to demonstrate specific personal workflow solutions that I have developed in my artistic practice.
It was started as an educational tool for my workshop in ambisonics at EMS - Stockholm and is constantly updated.
This exposition presents three approaches to re-enactment of medieval musical ideas, as explored through the artistic research project Wheels within Wheels. New approaches to interactions between performers and composers. The research project took place at the University of Bergen, Faculty of Art, Music and Design, Grieg Academy – Department of Music, from 2015 to 2018 under the auspices of the Norwegian Artistic Research Programme. The project led to three concerts and a sound installation. This exposition presents documentation of the results and gives an account of the research materials, tools and work methods, as well as discussing ethical and aesthetical dimensions of the working processes and the results.open exposition comments (0)
This page has the purpose of collecting in one place all the educational material about ambisonics and spatial audio that I have gathered through the years, and to demonstrate specific personal workflow solutions that I have developed in my artistic practice. It was started as an educational tool for my workshop in ambisonics at EMS - Stockholm and is constantly updated.open exposition comments (0)