Reconfiguring the Landscape was a Norwegian artistic research project hosted at the Norwegian Academy for Music and funded by the Norwegian Agency for International Cooperation and Quality Enhancement in Higher Education (DIKU).

Since the advent of portable sound recording, sound recorded from outdoor environments has permeated the materials and structures of electroacoustic composition and sound art, and in recent years, an awareness of the key role that sound has in architecture and environmental design has gained momentum.

In the field of music technology, tools such as higher-order ambisonics have become spatially precise to the extent that we can capture, analyse, and synthesise 3-D sound spaces at a resolution close to that of our spatial hearing. This new advancement offers the potential for electroacoustic composition to address, and be enriched by, the full spatial dimensionality of the sonic landscape. Unthinkable only a few years ago, it is this affordance and challenge that the Reconfiguring the Landscape project takes as its point of departure; thematically driven by an investigation into how 3-D electroacoustic composition and sound-art can evoke and provoke a new awareness of our outdoor environment.

The project was led by Natasha Barrett, and an international team of composers, technologists and scientists contributed in different ways. The project startup was in November 2019, just a few months before COVID impacted all activities. From 2020-2021 the project members worked independently. In 2022 group activities resumed. Research work formally ended early in 2023 and public dissemination and documentation concluded in November 2023.

The project began by investigating four cross-disciplinary modules aimed at exploring 3D soundscapes and landscapes from different angles and through different lenses of analysis:

Layering:

Compositions that draw on site-specific 3D sound and human behavior will be layered back into the existing environment. What are the implications of this combined 3D soundscape? What is the impact of the resulting multi-modal experience? What occurs in the counterpoint between the real and the added? What is the dialogue between reality, hyper-reality, and experience?

Enhancing:

How can we encourage the visitor to uncover details of sound and space that are too fleeting to be fully comprehended in the real-time flow, distracted from by the experience of our other senses, or occurring in our absence? We address what is present, to inspire and tempt our wish to linger and experience space and place. Enhancing reveals the living ‘soul’ of the original space interpreted by the artist.

Relocating:

What happens when we relocate 3-D sound from one site to another? In this module, high-speed internet will transmit 3-D audio over vast distances and merge one scene into another in real-time. It will connect locations in the world which share features such as climate, terrain and social function.

Modifying:

The quality of our acoustic environment is a rating that society has become more aware of. The normal way to address noise is by abatement. Is it possible to modify sound via acoustical intervention, to transform the ordinary into the remarkable and explore noise in a playful way?