Sharin Foo’s other band, The Raveonettes, an alternative indie rock band that has existed for 25 years, has always worked with and loved the stereo format. They produce, record, and release music in “glorious stereophonic,” which lies deep within their musical DNA and skillset. They have toured the world playing concerts in venues and festivals from a so-called picture frame stage setup, where the performer faces in one direction, while the audience faces the other. This is for the most part how the infrastructure of contemporary popular live concerts and touring is set up with plug-and-play solutions, and it is the access and the communion that has been shared for at least half a century within this musical tradition.
When playing concerts, they are heavily reliant on a front-of-house (FOH) sound engineer to translate the music, sound, and performance to the audience. On stage, the band plays and listens to the monitor representation of the sound that the audience is hearing. Sharin’s personal experience is that she has “probably been in the worst sound in the house” in most of their concerts.
As part of SØSTR’s spatial turn, we have physically and conceptually moved the stage to the center of the room. We choose to be seated on the floor facing each other, aiming for a soft and inclusive position in the center. Being in and sharing the same body of sound as the listener have significantly impacted our experience as performers and our experience of the performed sound. While we still collaborate with technical sound engineers, we feel a sense of agency to not rely solely on an FOH sound engineer to translate our sound.
In VSS, we treat our performances as concerts-as-laboratories—spaces where we test and develop spatial sound workflows in real time. We design custom interfaces that visualize sound in space, choosing to foreground gestures, control, and embodiment. We incorporate visuals to complement the performance and help create immersive spaces.
While we have worked in state-of-the-art environments, such as the Ambisonic NY Sal at DKDM or Meyer Sound’s Spacemap Go system at the LIFE Campus, throughout our research, we also prioritized more DIY and open-source tools and speaker setups (ring of eight speakers). Despite the wider access to technologies, which has opened an emerging field of possibilities, access to physical rooms with spatial sound facilities in which to compose and perform is still limited.
In contemporary popular music production, most work still takes place within a stereocentric framework and format. This paradigm, rooted in two-channel audio production, places the listener in a fixed, front-facing “sweet spot” where vocals and lead elements are pushed forward while supporting sounds are relegated to the background. Scherzer (2023) stresses that “[i]f you think in stereo, you design in stereo.” Through our project, we actively unlearned and are still unlearning stereo thinking and habits, renegotiating notions of front/back, compression, side chain, and layering. Even simple terms such as volume begin to change conceptually. For example, a sound moving farther away may create a similar sensation as fading out.
Spatial arrangement has the potential to renegotiate foreground/background relationships, where hierarchical sonic elements shift, overlap, and reconfigure more extensively than in traditional stereo. This opens up possibilities for new dramaturges, allowing voices, instruments, and narrative elements to occupy distinct locations in space. For example, does spatial polyphony that enables multiple sonic threads to unfold simultaneously offer a more complex, fluid understanding of sound?
We address this question and “spatial polyphony” as a method for our song Sweet Spot, which features two main melodies that occur simultaneously. Similar strategies to engage listeners with multiple simultaneous perspectives have been examined in stereo, for example, Velvet Underground’s The Murder Mystery, which presents two narratives at once, resulting in multiplicity of information. Perhaps, a spatial rendering of this song would leave more room for each voice, so to speak, to allow our brains to perceive both perspectives simultaneously.
We believe that in such subtle ways, spatial “color” has the potential to reshape songwriting and musical form, influencing voice, lyrics, and narrative focus. Space can become more of a compositional element than it already is in stereo, affecting musical experience, such as the time and pace in music.
Live spatialization and improvisation (further elaborated in the Sound Control) and strategies to create more open-ended sections in our live shows, such as “Universes” (further elaborated in the Going Spatial) have led to sections in our live shows where we tend to stretch time, letting songs unfold more slowly to create an ambient and meditative environment, embrace the space between sounds, and facilitate a contemplative listening mode and sense of being in a space shared between performers, audiences, and sounds.
In stereo, working with sonic multiplicity can sometimes lead to an overcrowded sound field or “masking,” although in the case of The Raveonettes and in rock genres, the sounds fighting for space in the limited stereo field is also what makes the sound just right, and that kind of music would not necessarily work in a high-fidelity resolution in 360-degrees around you.
We wonder whether the recent advancement of spatial sound technologies might have significantly impacted twenty-first-century popular music in the foreseeable future and whether we might be on the verge of a paradigm shift with regard to sound formats, musical expressions, and musical experiences. This spatial turn has been not only a new color in the musical palette but also a philosophical, political, and aesthetic reorientation. By “softening” the stage, for instance, placing it in the center of the room and down on the floor, we dissolve the traditional boundaries between the performer and the audience. Rather than simply presenting sound, we examined how it behaves in space. The whole scenario had a grounding effect on us as performers and on our performances. By designing our own interfaces, our live performances became a spatial laboratory where the audience witnesses a process of investigation rather than a musical performance in the traditional sense. The music is not about sound itself but about how sound is shaped by and interacts with space as the instrument.