Abstract
Real-world sound environments feature throughout sound-art. Fixed media soundscape compositions, electroacoustic music addressing eco-structuralism, site-specific sound installations, performers that use the sound landscape as their stage, and architects and city- planners that design sound-sensitive structures are increasingly common.
Despite this intense interest in soundscape-based sound-art, the creative approach developed in the early years of recording generally persists in current practice: that is, a process guided by experiential self-reflection. This approach has served for many decades, yet tends towards a closed loop limited by the ear’s and body’s variable awareness.
I propose a practice that hybridises autoethnography with computational analysis to overcome the limitations of experiential personal reflection, without denying the value of the artist as the creative force. In this paper I have chosen to focus on the affordances of spatial sound in outdoor environments framed in a musical perspective. The work draws on the perceptual theories of Gibson and Ingold, and on the possibilities that computational tools such as 3D sound decomposition and music information retrieval have to offer. To illustrate the hybridisation approach, I present non-technical examples from my current experiments. The work is part of the Reconfiguring the Landscape project funded by the Norwegian Artistic Research Council.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3411109.3411120
Abstract
Sound penetrates our outdoor spaces. Much of it we ignore amidst our fast passage from place to place, its qualities may be too quiet or fleeting to pay heed to above the bustle of our own thoughts, or we may experience the sounds as an annoyance. Manoeuvring our listening to be excited by its features is not so easy.
This paper presents new artistic research that probes the hidden artefacts of everyday soundscapes - the sounds and details which we ignore or fail to engage - and draws them into a new audible reality. The work focuses on the affordances of spatial information in a novel combination of art and technology: site-specific composition and the ways of listening established by Schaeffer and his successors are combined with the technology of beam-forming from high resolution (Eigenmike) Ambisonics recordings, Ambisonics sound-field synthesis and the deployment of a new prototype loudspeaker. Underlying the artistic and scientific research is the hypothesis that spatially distributed information offers new opportunities to explore, isolate and musically develop features of interest, and that composition should address the same degree of spatiality as the real landscape. The work is part of the 'Reconfiguring the Landscape' project investigating how 3-D electroacoustic composition and sound-art can incite a new awareness of outdoor sound environments.
Abstract
Compact spherical loudspeaker arrays exhibit controllable directivity, and electroacoustic musicians have recently become interested in using their beamforming capacities to compose spatial music. In particular, directivities of 3rd-order or higher turned out to offer a sufficiently precise horizontal control. Our engineering brief proposes the 170 compact spherical loudspeaker design that is DIY-3D-printable and only uses 8 audio channels. The 170 array houses seven 2.5” broadband transducers that allow third-order horizontal beamforming and a 6” subwoofer. We make the CAD model, electroacoustic measurements, and control filters openly accessible and show its beampatterns for verification, based on those measurements.