Paper accepted to SMC 2024

A paper by Stefano Catena and myself about compositional strategies for multichannel speaker systems has been accepted by SMC 2024 in Porto. Here's the abstract:

While spatial audio technologies have developed dramatically in the last twenty years, the compositional approaches to spatialisation in electroacoustic music are still fragmented. No coherent and shared language for spatialisation exists yet, and it is often challenging to reproduce an electroacoustic piece in different space from the one it was conceived in. In this paper we delve deeper into an approach about spatial audio and spatialisation techniques in the electroacoustic arts called 'speaker agnosticism'. By introducing Lilla Salen, a multichannel system of up to 49 speakers in a dome like configuration, and the authors' compositions, we describe a method of treating the concert hall as an instrument irrespective of the number of speakers it contains, or their arrangement. This paradigm shift encourages an 'organic' approach to music spatialisation, steering away from the traditional 'Euclidean' mindset. Finally, this project hints at the possibility of 'touring' pieces: by treating multichannel systems rather as instruments. Thanks to current audio technologies it is possible to 'transcribe' works between concert halls without the musical intention of the composer being lost.

The file is available here.