Voicing Spatial Songs (VSS) is an artistic research project hosted by the Rhythmic Music Conservatory (RMC) in Copenhagen and conducted by sisters Louise Lind Foo and Sharin Foo (a.k.a. SØSTR).
As the title Voicing Spatial Songs suggests, the research explores the relationship between space and music. Voicing carries a double meaning: In music, it refers to how harmony is constructed—how the same notes, arranged differently, can result in radically different sonic outcomes. This reflects a key focus in artistic research: how methods, approaches, and processes influence the final outcome. Voicing also relates to voice as an expression, agency, and opinion.
The term “songs” in our project title refers to artistic and musical contents in a broader sense. The research project is embedded in the musical duo SØSTR, described as “vocal and lyrics-based alt-pop.”
The aim of VSS is to develop methodologies for spatial practice, performance, and songwriting. Over the course of three years (2022–2025), SØSTR has shifted from writing, producing, releasing, and performing music in stereo to exploring a new spatial aesthetic. The research does not focus on the acoustic experience of sound but rather on sound mediated through speaker systems or recorded formats.
SØSTR has been “going spatial,” as Laurie Anderson and Edgar Choueiri (2021) put it in their article of that title. They argue that space in music creation is emerging as an element we must learn to understand almost from scratch: “The spatial ‘color’ has largely been missing from the composer’s palette… It is as if the color red were always missing from the painter’s palette for purely technical reasons” (Anderson & Choueiri 2021).
Anderson and Choueri refer to new technological possibilities. It is not that space has not been considered historically in music creation but rather that what is new today—and what lets us discover those “uses of the color red”—is the growing accessibility to spatial‐sound technologies and the emergence of multispeaker rooms for immersive listening and concert experiences. Tools, once confined to research labs or elite studios, reach a much wider range of artists and communities. VSS asks, “What happens when we, as artists, engage creatively with this new spatial ‘color’? How will it sound, and what challenges do we meet when we gain experience with and develop methods and skills around a spatial aesthetic?” These questions echo throughout the exposition, through our documentation of developing performativity (e.g., interface design and songwriting) in a spatial context and our custom-built interfaces: Bagua, Space Halo, and Chaos Pendulum, which, besides facilitating spatial sound, have become artistic works in their own right. They echo through our iterative series of events; workshops, installations, lectures, and performances in collaboration with institutions such as VEGA Lab, The Sound Studies Lab, ITU’s Affective Interactions and Relations Lab, and the RMC. They also echo through our “thoughts,” which are reflective texts and dialogue with context and history, including Feminist Ears, Voice/Body, Sweet Spot, and Sound Control.
We began our spatial turn, orienting ourselves spatially, both technologically, using different software and through interface design, and creatively, through the reimagining of stereo songs in spatial contexts. Examples of the spatial strategies used in all our songs are communicated through Spatial Scores and elaborated more technically in Going Spatial.
The final stage of our research project involved spatial experiments, such as Hymn for 12 Butterflies, and the composition of two original songs, Sweet Spot and Ghostly Voices, which were specifically composed for and with our custom interfaces. Writing new material directly for this context opens up further possibilities for experimentation and the development of new compositional methods.
Our investigation not only transformed our own practice in SØSTR but also led us to connect with other sound creators who were exploring spatial sound, as it became clear to us that there are as many ways to work with spatial sound as there are practitioners. Alongside the technical shift is a cultural one — in which we hope to see a growing emphasis on sharing ideas, methods, and conceptual approaches, not just final works. This spirit of openness, dialogue, and collective exploration is central to how spatial sound practices could be evolving. One direct outcome of dialogue is the anthology Multi-Voicing Spatial Songs and the deck of Spatial Strategies, which both exist as physical releases and digitally as part of this exposition.
In this exposition, we do not attempt to replicate the original experiences of the site-specific, multispeaker environments in which the research was conducted. Instead, our approach was to compose specifically for the online format through the interactive sonic spheres in order to evoke imagined sounds in the reader’s mind. The approach used a combination of text, graphic notations, stereo and binaural recordings, images, and videos to convey ideas about sound in space. As such, this exposition cannot represent the full sonic picture. This limitation raises important questions: How can spatial sound be preserved, communicated, and distributed in the future? What might an archive of spatial sound works look like?
This exposition intends to activate your spatial imagination and inspire new inner and outer sound worlds.
A spatial turn requires our lively spatial imagination; technology is of subordinate concern here. It requires our sensibility in listening, capacity to verbalize spatial phenomena, ability to discuss phenomena, and curiosity to experiment. It requires artistic research not only to explore new technical tools but also to challenge familiar aesthetics and narrative strategies.
(Sherzer, 2023)
Johannes Sherzer is the cofounder of SPÆS
(a lab for spatial aesthetics in sound).
Sharin Foo is one-half of the internationally acclaimed rock duo The Raveonettes. Since their debut in 2002, the band has had an international career, toured the world, released twelve full-length albums, and influenced generations to come. Sharin is also an associate professor at the RMC in Copenhagen, where she is part of the faculty of Artistic Development Work (KUA).
Louise Foo has a sound and visual arts practice, in addition to being part of the duos SØSTR and Glas (with Lisbet Fritze). She works with multichannel interactive installations, and her recent work counts sonification of Greenland’s ice melt for the Icefjord Centre and “planetary” ceramic/glass sound objects with FOO/SKOU for the Tycho Brahe Planetarium Nikolaj Kunsthal and Trapholt. Forthcoming is a solo show at Bricks Gallery and a project for Elsinore’s CLICK Festival.