The Choreography of Sound (CoS) is an artistic research project, co-authored by Gerhard Eckel and Ramón Gonzalez-Arroyo, funded by the Austrian Science Fund FWF (PEEK AR41) and carried out at the Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics IEM of the University of Music and Performing Arts of Graz (KUG), between September 2010 and September 2013. The project team was completed with David Pirrò and Martin Rumori.
In this approach, musical sound is conceived with a spatial extension, suggesting the perception of an entity occupying space, dwelling in a place. A departing state from where it naturally evolved a search for an emergent phenomenon: the perception of materiality of synthetic sound matter – the illusion of a sound object with the corporality of a plastic object.
Le us underline that we are talking of "musical sound', sound composed in a musical context. An essential assumption being that, beyond the level of tests and raw experiments, this searched for perceptual goal-field will only be achieved through the collaborative action of compositional and technological forces.
The CoS-webpage provides generous information on the project: the team, its originating ideas and the activities surrounding it, including the project-proposal text. The webpage serves as neuralgic centre for all information concerning the project, with pointers to this and other documentation.
This entry to the RC-catalog, conceived as an autonomous whole, embraces almost all final documentation of my contribution to the project. A set of documents with reflections, descriptions and analysis, including some sensual approach to its outcome through graphics and soundfiles. Reflection and Experience. A hopefully coherent kaleidoscopic view into the results of the project, wherein musical pieces are research statements.
The project focuses on the spatial dimension of musical sound in the domain of electroacoustic music. Synthetic sound, as opposed to acoustic sound with its attributes causally deriving from its origin, has no inherent properties, everything must be designed, composed. Its conception can be viewed, therefore, as that of a formal construct, wherein qualitative, temporal and spatial characteristics are defined, on the understanding that these three types of features are, from a perceptual point of view, tightly intertwined and cannot be addressed with total independence.