A vague description, a motor of research, the goal in view when building up experimental setups. The idea of the Plastic Sound Object seemed to match well Rheinberger’s definition of research object or epistemic thing¹, and, accordingly, it has been evolving along the time of the project as experiments and reflection were advancing. At the time of writing the proposal we had not yet forged an expression to name it because we had not yet constructed the idea as an entity, but one could already find a somewhat fragmented description that contained the basic elements of its conception. Soon after the start of the project, at the RaumKoncepte Symposium held at KUG, the expression was already part of our internal jargon and as such was introduced in the talk we gave as presentation of the project. Different aspects of its conception have been winning or loosing ascendancy along the time of the project, while its essence as a hybrid of the plastic and the aural has deepened its roots, broadening its significance. At the talk I gave when introducing one of the pieces at the major presentation of the project in September 2012, I did state that the Plastic Sound Object “is not a chimera, but an entelechy at the core of the poetics of a compositional approach”. With this phrase we may as well understand that the process of internalization of the idea has attained a certain level of maturation, leaving aside, though not excluding, the singularity of the ‘magic’ emergent perception as a special particular case.

In this text I shall try to encircle the idea, by stating the elements which constitute its conception, unfolding them and deriving the consequences on the light of the results achieved from the research in this project. It must be said that our intuition at the time of writing the proposal was well founded and oriented, for almost by following its precepts we did manage some valuable steps in advance, serving us, therefore, as guiding line to introduce ourselves into the project without further preamble.

The present text is a complement to another article of mine, “Towards a Plastic Sound Object”², written as contribution to the book emerging from the Raum:Koncepte symposium above-mentioned. In this other article, written in the middle of the research process, I was developing the context on which such a concept is sustained.

Description

Let it be clearly stated before even we start that we are dealing with a musical object, perhaps the lowest in the hierarchy of formal levels in the musical flow, but a composed object nonetheless, and not of mere sound out of context.

There are four elements on which the description of the Plastic Sound Object is founded.

In the composition of the sound object the spatial dimension is an integral part of its conception and design.

The qualitative and behavioural (spectro-temporal) aspects in the design of a sound object are intimately interrelated to its spatial definition.

We seek for the emergence of the illusion of materiality: a sound object with the corporality of a plastic object.

Space is not conceived as an amorphous continuum but as a network of potential places.

The first two elements tell us something of how it is constituted, how it is done, the third one of how it is perceived; the fourth one is somehow a mixture of both. This duality between how things are built and how are they perceived is a fundamental aspect to keep in mind. Undoubtedly, how things are constituted and how are they perceived are related questions, but these relationships are anything but direct and simple. In our approach, the fundamental elements to our understanding of these relationships come from the concepts of correlation/decorrelation and of those of fusion and segregation as developed in the psychoacoustics theory of Bregman³.

Spatial extension

One first essential consequence from the above description is that the object has to be decomposable, a whole made of many, made of corpuscles or/and components. There would not be any other way to define an object with an intrinsic spatial extension. Indeed, pre-composed or post-processed spectral evolutions may enhance the spatiality of a mono-component sound object to the extent of achieving the perception of a virtual spatial extension, and without denying their value, or opposing to their usage, what we are proposing is for a ‘composed’ inner space of the sound object. The sound object will occupy a physical space by assigning different spatial properties to each of its parts.

We need therefore at least one spatial dimension: it cannot be a source point, it has to be at least along a line (a segment), but its full potentialities are only developed when working on two dimensions (a surface) or three dimensions (a body).

I have been using granular synthesis, because this technique allows having a more detailed control over the synthetic object, and opens up immensely the palette of sensorial qualities. Of course, a granular approach does not necessarily imply a corpuscular texture; again a duality between the constitution and the perceived.

With this first element, we have applied, so to speak, ‘brutal force’ to assign a spatial extension to our sound object –we will have placed different elements of our sound entity on different spatial locations; it is an essential step but it might not be enough. It will be so constituted, but it is not clear whether we shall perceive it as such. For that purpose we need fundamentally to knit together the qualitative aspects of sound with the spatial. In the same way that we assign relationships to different components of synthetic sound in order to obtain coherence and fusion, we will need to include the spatial aspects in this network of relationships to convey the idea of a whole with a spatial extension. These relationships can be very loose, almost intuitive, since qualitative aspects will in many cases tend to create their own spatial halo. However, the more we formalize internally these relationships, the more robust the perception.

Materiality

We move now into the domain of the virtual, of a perception that builds up a model beyond the information it receives. In order to achieve this virtual sensation of materiality we are seeking for, one has to convey the feeling of dwelling on a place, of persistency and coherence. In a certain sense, the moment we achieve the perception of spatiality –of a sound object occupying a space– as we were mentioning on the paragraph before, we will be achieving a certain perception of materiality. We have already mentioned this spatial halo that the qualitative brings forth with it, and there we may rely on all those pictorial metaphors of colour and texture with which music has so often played. This is a most delicate matter for which I have not developed any formal law. The matching of space and the qualitative (the ‘colour’, the ‘texture’) has followed pure intuition and, not rarely, a trial-and-error process. We are certainly dealing with a complex interaction, if only because the spatial attributes affect the perceived qualities, and vice versa.

It is important to note that the naturalness with which our perception accepts a sensation of materiality of the sound object makes it at times almost transparent. The perception of materiality has, anyway, many degrees, it is not a yes or no, and what was really interesting and in itself almost a discovery is that this palette of perceptual nuances may become a powerful means for the compositional process.

Behaviour

Sound, however, is more like a fluid; it unfolds in time, its temporal flow being essential to its nature. We must therefore consider the dynamics of a system. We were defining a network of interrelations, and we have to consider now their evolution in time. It is through a network of interrelated behavioural laws, even subliminal to the ear, that we will manage an even stronger cohesion, and hence a fuller and more robust sensation of materiality.

This should not be a surprise; we already knew that in the synthesis of sound it is through the evolutions in time of the different parameters and their relationships that we achieve with greater ease coherence and fusion. We are simply leaning even more solidly on the mechanisms of perception.

The next step I gave –in my case, as I said, I was using granular synthesis– was to add spatial micro-movements to the grain itself. It is important to note that the duration of the grain doesn't allow perceiving this micro-movement per se, but experience showed that there is a net contribution to the global perception of the sound object. It does indeed add a new degree of robustness to the feeling of materiality, but it is very delicate. As one could have imagined, with certain type of material, there emerges immediately a sensation of modulation, which, does indeed add robustness but at the cost of modifying the global qualitative sensation in one recognizable direction.

The real step forward into the realm of the plastic object came later when I developed what I called the Sigma-micro-object (sigma standing for addition). The idea, somehow simple, is to decompose even further the object. Components would be built of sub-components which would have a certain degree of autonomy with respect to the overall ruling laws. These sub-components, or micro-components as I was calling them, may deviate (according to some regulating law) from the component laws; the overall (component) laws serving as guiding rules. There is therefore a hierarchy of behavioural laws in the definition of the sound object. The micro-behaviours are heard but not consciously perceived necessarily, and the result is that the sensations of cohesion, persistency and placement –dwelling in a place– are strongly enhanced. We touch the perception of corporality.

Let it be clear that we have been referring above only to an internal dynamicity, to a static object ‘standing’ on a place. All this dynamicity may be so subtle that it is not immediately perceived as such. Then afterwards there can be gestures and transitions and movements across the space, which, defined as new laws, would be superimposed to the ones defining the internal state.

Composing the Setup

Though the idea of a composed speakers-setup is not bound exclusively to that of the Plastic Sound Object, its raison d’être is intimately linked to it, or to its antecedents. I had already worked, perhaps somewhat timidly, in that direction with pieces like Streams, Extremes & Dreams⁴ [2002] or A Media Luna⁵ [2004] but an important step was taken with L’isla des Neumas⁶ [2007], Toiles en l’Air⁷ [2008] and Light Matters⁸ [2010]. In all of these last cases the morphology of the setup is intimately linked to the compositional ideas, and this mainly because the concept of  ‘sound-surface’ became an important element in my musical vocabulary.

The Plastic Sound Object has to lean on a structure of speakers that allows its spatial constitution. A two dimensional structure with speakers on its nodes for a surface, a three dimensional for a body. Place, rather than space, becomes the central concept, and the speakers-setup has to be built with this idea in mind. Here comes our fourth element in the description of the Plastic Sound Object: a network of potential places where it might dwell, across which it might move.

There are two very important things to mention concerning my approach to the composition of the setup.

The first one is that speakers have to be oriented searching to create relationships between them. On my first approach the basic structure to “place” a sound-surface was a group of three speakers looking at each other, a kind of container. (Naturally, there could be more than three speakers, when they would be on the same plane). This kind of group that arose by pure intuition has been sanctioned by experience on a number of previous pieces, and I hold to it as a basic “unit” in the setup constitution. It is very interesting how our perception knows of these links and groupings. A body, which for the time being I have only approached as the volume delimited by two surfaces, would be created by two or more of these units. Thus, looking partially or totally to another speaker is the main linking law. There can be, however, other type of links, like proximity or looking towards a same location, and if working with reflections, then, many other possible links can be considered.

The second thing to mention is that once the setup has been constituted, it is ‘analyzed’ to extract different possible groupings of the setup as a whole, or of parts of it. I have for this purpose created a nomenclature, where ‘Groups’ are these basic units, and ‘Constellations’ are sets of related Groups. In this way a same configuration of speakers may lead to a plurality of ‘place’-structures, it s a question of finding (or designing) different linking structures. This is an important moment of the composition because it opens up different perspectives to the space. I have spent much time looking at the setups or at graphical representations of them to find different possible perspectives while composing the pieces during the project. As you can well imagine this is in reality a feedback process: building up from an idea, followed by analysis and discovery of new possibilities, slight modifications to adequate even better, and so on.

Conclusions and beyond

The search for the Plastic Sound Object has been a most rewarding, fascinating experience. In the end, and as I mentioned somehow in the introduction to this text, I have surely enriched my compositional approach to electroacoustic music, and I guess that anyone following this or a similar path would indeed feel that also. Discovering a potential methodology to achieve a special perception of synthetic sound, new, at least, to me, opens up a world of new possibilities. This does not mean that I believe I have managed a clear, net perception of plasticity under all circumstances. I still believe this is a compositional question, and every musical piece will have to build it up by creating its own context.

The path is set, however, and the path can still be improved. For that purpose, anyway, probably a new underlying software system would have to be designed. Let me here give, as a conclusion to this text, a short number of pointers for possible enhancements.

The idea underlying the Sigma-micro-object can still be further developed. I am convinced that the idea is broader and richer than the case I have implemented. Further, from the two ways there are of organizing this kind of object, up-down or down-up, I have only tried the first one which is the one I described above, with global laws and deviating laws. The other organizing sense, down-up, in which the overall behaviour would emerge as a result of the interaction of micro-behaviours, will surely bring some other new interesting ways of thinking.

Bodies, as I mentioned above, have only been conceived as the volume delimited by two surfaces. It would be interesting to have other ways to describe three-dimensional shapes. The important thing is not the shape itself, for I do not think we can perceive through our ears any shape at all; the important thing is the way in which these structures might be formalized opening other handles to its design and control, and the possibility to conceive bodies on other geometrical configurations of the setup which my current approach does not cover.

It would be extremely interesting to have algorithmic procedures for the speakers-setup analysis, and from there to an automatic production of potential places and paths through them, or in other words of Groups and Constellations. I have built some algorithms to make triangulations and to choose automatically trajectories of surfaces through a setup of speakers, but I can imagine more complex configurations of speakers where an algorithmic procedure to generate ‘place’-structures would be extremely helpful, beyond opening the door to other conceptual approaches.

All spatial technologies, from the more primitive linear panning to the most refined wavefield synthesis are welcomed into this approach. One will be better to express certain states or behaviours, or will be better in itself to achieve a proposed spatial aura, but other might be better for a different one. Even further, for certain purposes different spatialisation algorithms can be understood as ‘spatial’ flavours –doing the same or similar effects with different means, and therefore achieving similar but not equal perceptions–, and combining them in a same context enriches the palette of procedures (and indirectly that of qualitative sensations) and helps to differentiate objects or places from each other. Contrasts and similarities, segregation and fusion: important elements in the mechanics of the work process with this type of objects, denser and subtler at the same time.

Notes:

1] Hans-Jörg Rheinberger: Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube. Standford: Stanford University Press. 1997

2] Ramón González-Arroyo: Towards a Plastic Sound Object in : Petra Ernst, Alexandra Strohmaier (eds.), Raum: Konzepte in den Künsten, Kultur- und Naturwissenschaften, Nomos Verlag (Baden Baden). 2013

3] A.S. Bregman: Auditory Scene Analysis: The Perceptual Organization of Sound. Cambridge, Mass.: Bradford Books, MIT Press. 1990

4]  Ramón González-Arroyo: “Streams, Extremes & Dreams” (2002), 24.channels  electroacoustic piece. Commissioned and produced by Z.K.M. (Karlsruhe); Premiere: 7-VI-2002; Festival Z.K.M. Karlsruhe

5]  Ramón González-Arroyo: “A Media Luna” (2004), 16.channels electroacoustic piece; Commissioned by G.R.M.; Premiere: 29-V-2004; Salle Olivier Messiaen, Paris

6] Ramón González-Arroyo: “L’isla des Neumas” (2007), sound installation 7.channels; Commissioned by  Koldo Mitxelena Museum; Premiere: 12-VII-2007; “Dimensión Sonora” Exhibition at Koldo Mitxelena Museum, San Sebastian

7] Ramón González-Arroyo: “Toiles en l’Air” (2008), 15.channels electroacoustic piece; Commissioned by Sammlung Essl; Premiere: 22-X-2008; Essl Museum, Klosterneuburg 

8] Ramón González-Arroyo: “Light Matters” (2010), 16.channels electroacoustic piece; Commissioned by G.R.M.; Premiere: 27-VI-2010; Salle Olivier Messiaen, Paris