Introduction

This exposition presents a sound installation for web browsers titled Compression, which uses the listener’s audio set-up and creates a self-regulating audio feedback. In doing so it adapts itself to the particular sonorous and technological conditions of the listener’s environment. This exposition describes the installation, which has been developed especially for the Research Catalogue, and previous works of mine that are based on similar principles. Compression is thus both a new and independent work and a work that functions as a form of documentation of some of my previous works. It makes their principles and workings accessible, tangible, and experiential apart from their actual performance.

            The works presented here are part of a larger investigation of (musical) compositional models, the materiality of sound, and sound description. They address what I understand to be a fundamental aspect of musical composition: the productive contradiction between sound and its idea or description. I understand a compositional model as an immanently artistic concept of this relation or non-relation, which is produced and thought in compositional practice itself. Hence, compositional models are situated in the intersection between the intelligible and the sensible. The works presented here are part of a series of works of mine in which I endeavour to entangle abstract algorithmic sound descriptions, such as synthesis methods, and concrete physical spaces, actions, and materials. They investigate the intersection of the intelligible and the sensible, a form of methexis or ‘participation’, by creating compositional models that connect procedural descriptions of sound with the realities of sounding bodies.