Spatialization, DMU, 2024

a critical overview

June 16, 2024

Henrik Frisk - henrik.frisk@kmh.se

About me

henrik.jpg
  • Musician and composer
  • Professor at KMH in Stockholm: artistic research and electroacoustic music composition
  • Research interests include:
    • artistic practices and interaction
    • aesthetics and ethics
    • spatialization
    • historical electronic instruments and their practice

Questions

What is the arena in which art can both make use of, and critically examine, contemporary technologies such as immersive audio, and how can this activity contribute to a strengthened social and political awareness of these technologies?

The aim, more specifically

is to better understand and articulate the experience of spatial properties in both natural sounds and music, and use this knowledge in composition

because this has to some extent been overshadowed by the technology of spatialization

Gives rise to even more questions

  • How can spatial information in sound be conceptualized in ways that can inform, inspire and expand the creation of new sound-works?

"we may say that the normative and technical enfold and order the subjective and perspectival" (Born, G., 2013)

Born (2013): Music Sound and Space. Transformations of Public and Private Experience. Cambridge University Press

Gives rise to even more questions

  • How can spatial information in sound be conceptualized in ways that can inform, inspire and expand the creation of new sound-works?
  • How can a vocabulary for the experience of spatiality be developed that provoke an analytical and critical approach to composition?
  • How can spatial sound-works be staged in ways that encourage listeners to actively engage in their listening experience?

History and Background

What is the role of space in music?

  • Shopenhauer: “perceived solely in and through time, to the complete exclusion of space.” (Jones, R.E., 2007)
  • Scruton: "space is still merely a secondary quality concealed by the dominance of time and pitch" (Scruton, R., 1999)
  • Eric Clarke confirms: authoritative position held by the symbolic representation is important (Clarke, E., 2013)

Space in sound

  • It is almost impossible to divorce space from sound.
  • Even lack of space is space
  • Space is embedded in the perception of the sound
  • Commonly, spatial aspects of music are artificially superimposed on sound
  • The possibilities of the virtual are seen to supersede reality

The history of audio spatialization

  • Walt Disney: Fantasia (1940)
  • Stockhausen
    • Gesang der Jünglinge (1955)
  • Maryanne Amacher
    • Adjacencies (1965)
  • Xenakis
    • The many Polytype's for example (early 70's)

Structures

  • IRCAM, Paris
  • ZKM, Karlsruhe
  • SARC, Belfast
  • MUMMUTH, Graz
  • CCRMA, Stanford
  • BEAST, Birmingham
  • HISS, Huddersfield

Structures

  • The GRM Acousmonium

    The point of concert performance is to exploit the possibilities of the work by extending it into physical space.

High definition speaker arrays

  • using technology to simulate the auditory envelopment of concert halls
  • the dual nature of compositional practices: first imagine and then render as truthfully as possible
  • working on spatial audio with complex speaker configurations: a certain emphasis is put on the technology

Who is in control?

  • the landscape is shifting: spatial audio are not fringe technologies
  • academia and research institutions are not necessarily leading the development

What is at the centre?

the spatialization equipment and technology have become readily available, but the users haven’t caught up (Otondo, Felipe, 2008)

Barret in Otondo (2008): Contemporary Trends In The Use Of Space In Electroacoustic Music

Aural space

although there is a vast body of scholarly work both on the physical acoustics of enclosed spaces and on perceiving acoustic parameters, the literature is relatively silent on the subject of how people experience aural space (Blesser, B. and Salter, L.R., 2009)

Blesser & Salter (2009) Spaces Speak Are You Listening?: Experiencing Aural Architecture

One remarkable exceptions is of course Dennis Smalley in Space-form and the acousmatic image (Smalley, Denis, 2007)

Smalley (2007) Space-form and the acousmatic image

The subjective experience of spatial audio

subjective listening experience as an experience of envelopment -> novel methods for understanding and achieving spatiality in sound based on an understanding of the experience

The politics of spatial sound

  • Three dimensional audio systems are mostly built on the concert hall aesthetics with the passive listener at the centre
  • The more central position, the more expensive is the ticket - a class representation and hence also a social structure
  • What happens to the aesthetics of spatial audio if the movements of the listener is also taken into account?
  • Is the nature of spatial audio reliant on large speaker arrays, or alternatively binaural renderings?

Theoretical perspectives

Aesthetics of spatial sound

  • What is the artistic purpose of spatial sound?
  • In composition, is the sound a representation of the world, or is it its own world in which virtual spaces are created?
  • Again: Today media companies are widely engaging in immersive audio, but it is unclear what the specific quality is that promotes this.

Immersive arts

What is the aesthetic driving force behind the idea of immersive sound?

  • "immersive artworks turn into experience machines." (Mäcklin, Harri, 2021)

Mäcklin (2021): A Heideggerian Critique of Immersive Art

Experience of space

  • The listening mind does not solely rely on the ears, the whole body is listening, not the least when it comes to spatial perception
  • "art is the art of affect" (Grosz, E., 2008)
  • Phenomenology of sound
  • Consider not only the sonic properties of a sound, but the whole experience of it

Vocabulary of spatial properties

  • A theory of spatial audio could lead to a vocabulary
  • Dennis Smalley's Space-form and the acousmatic image is an attempt
  • Georgina Born comments on the overly strong focus on a Euclidian perspective in electroacoustic music that becomes limiting (Born, G., 2013)

A vocabulary of spatial properties

  • should allow for a wide range of definitions of place and direction as well as immersive sounds that may have a place but not a position
  • should allow for an analytical engagement with spatial sound
  • could allow for helpful notation

Practice

Harmonic Space

A possible relation between harmony and spatiality (Tenney, James, 2008)

tenney_three_five_seven2.png

For Bill, Rising

A completely different approach

  • Space can be made an integral parameter similar to pitch, rythm and timbre.
  • Composition methods where all parameters are treated equally important in sound synthesis
  • Spatial position, the pitches, the rhythms and the patterns are generated at once
  • Several techniques for controlling space may be used in parallel (VBAP, phase, stereo panning, direct panning and ambisonics)

What is aesthetically desirable?

  • In this landscape, how can an aesthetics of spatial sound be defined? What is good music?
    • The highest resolution?
    • The best distribution?
    • The greatest diffusion?

Experience of space in sound

A recurring symposium in which we have tried to address a few of the questions above using several different methods.

Listening excursions

  1. Find a place
  2. Take a few minutes to listen to the sounds in this place, in particular, listen to how the sounds communicate space
  3. Have brief discussion with the others in your group
  4. Move to the next place and repeat the excercise

Experience in Sound

experience_sound_1.png

Experience in Sound

experience_sound_2.png

Finally

Summary

  • how may we better understand and articulate the experience of spatial properties in both natural sounds and music
  • the technologies of audio spatialization are to a high degree governed by multinational media companies
  • many of the structures for performing immersive works are complex both socially and politically
  • there is a long history of discrediting spatiality as a relevant parameter in music

Summary

  • there is a lack of vocabulary
  • the aesthetics of spatial sound is complex and entangled with strong market forces
  • there is a need for developing new methods for better understanding the impact of spatial properties in music
  • with relevant theories and methods immersive music can continue to develop and be developed

Thank you!

Bibliography

Blesser, B. and Salter, L.R. (2009). Spaces Speak, Are You Listening?: Experiencing Aural Architecture, MIT Press.

Born, G. (2013). Music, Sound and Space: Transformations of Public and Private Experience, Cambridge University Press.

Chion, Michel (1988). Les deux espaces de la musique concr{\`e}te, L’espace du son.

Clarke, E. (2013). Music, Space and Subjectivity., Cambride: Cambride University Press.

Grosz, E. (2008). Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth, Columbia University Press.

Jones, R.E. (2007). Music and the Numinous, Rodopi.

Mäcklin, Harri (2021). A Heideggerian Critique of Immersive Art, Gatherings: The Heidegger Circle Annual.

Normandeau, Robert (2009). Timbre Spatialisation: The medium is the space, Cambridge University Press.

Otondo, Felipe (2008). Contemporary trends in the use of space in electroacoustic music, Cambridge University Press.

Scruton, R. (1999). The Aesthetics of Music, Oxford University Press.

Smalley, Denis (2007). Space-form and the acousmatic image, Cambridge University Press.

Tenney, James (2008). On 'Crystal Growth' in Harmonic Space (1993 - 1998)., Contemporary Music Review.

Henrik Frisk