2.1. Musical context

During the twentieth century, a notable conceptual expansion occurred in philosophy, and provided the backdrop to some important developments in music, with a particularly strong impact on electroacoustic spatial sound works. Phenomenological investigations into lived experience from a first-person perspective (Merleau-Ponty Reference Merleau-Ponty1962; Petitmengin Reference Petitmengin2007) developed methods and vocabularies for conceptually grasping this fleeting dimension.

In the context of musique concrète, these phenomenological perspectives led to the formulation of a notion of musical objects (Schaeffer Reference Schaeffer1966) in a mode of reduced listening (as related to epochë and the consequent suspension of judgement), as well as in deep listening (Oliveros Reference Oliveros2005). Following in this lineage, specific focus was given both to listening (Ihde [1976] Reference Ihde2007) and to more particular enquiries into what we hear when we listen to music (Welten Reference Welten2009). In parallel, and influenced by social anthropology, the notions of atmosphere (Böhme Reference Böhme1995) or ambiance (Thibaud Reference Thibaud2020) arose, and the concept of the soundscape was both coined and critiqued (Schafer Reference Schafer1993; Ingold Reference Ingold and Carlyle2007).

These different aspects of sonic spaces influence, and are conditioned by, the ways in which we experience sound. Music, more specifically, ‘shapes sound in a great diversity of ways … and at the same time shapes the social interactions that take place within those spaces’ (Cook Reference Cook and Born2013: 238). As we shall see later, it is not only these social relations that are affected through the ways in which space is articulated through sound, but also the listener’s internal relations to the many different ways that space is articulated are influenced. So there is an obvious interaction between the listener’s response to the space experienced, the properties of the sound that gave rise to the experience and the place in which the sound occurred.

Associated with these approaches, a systematisation of sound objects (Chion and Schaeffer Reference Chion and Schaeffer1983; Chion Reference Chion2009), spatial descriptors (Smalley Reference Smalley2007) and effects of built environments on sound (Augoyard and Torgue Reference Augoyard and Torgue2005) has emerged, and provides useful tools for the analysis of sound-scenes (Bregman Reference Bregman1994) by acousticians (Blauert Reference Blauert1983), urban planners and architects (Böhme et al. Reference Böhme, Elı́asson and Pallasmaa2014), sound designers (Blesser and Salter Reference Blesser and Salter2007) and other artistic practitioners in the medium of sound (Kahn Reference Kahn1999). This has led to a discourse in electroacoustic music that favours taxonomies, categorisations and formalised modes of representation, through which these subdivisions into parametric and descriptive systems are gradually becoming prescriptive by virtue of their ubiquity.

Furthermore, the technical tools prevalent in studio practices today operate on principles shaped by science and engineering paradigms rather than artistic ones. They allow the creation and shaping of musical operations in systems of spatial simulation that have become almost transparent on the level of representation. Techniques such as panning (including in full periphonic three dimensions with higher-order spherical decomposition), reverb (both simulated and captured natural spatial imprints) and psycho-acoustic methods of producing acoustic signatures for spatial immersion have been developed to a high degree of sophistication. These already stable tools are becoming more and more standardised and commercialised, and increasingly more sophisticated. They allow for the artificial superimposition of spatial aspects on the music in an environment where the virtual becomes more real than reality: ‘Immersive artworks turn into experience machines’ (Mäcklin Reference Mäcklin2021).Footnote ¹ This is consistent with the common notion alluded to earlier that space is something that is added to a sound rather than gathered from it. We argue that the study of spatiality in music has been shaped by this misconception to some degree.

In a survey on compositional practices for spatialisation published in 2011, simulating concert halls by technological means was one of the most sought-after functions (Peters et al. Reference Peters, Marentakis and McAdams2011), which points back to the dual nature of compositional practices. It suggests a focus on the performance and experience of the technology, that is, the means for reproducing the composer’s intentions, rather than on the experience of the spatiality of the sound. It also points to spatiality as something separate from the music, as an add-on if you wish. As can be deduced from this bias, technology unwittingly appears to have become the primary subject, and the listener’s attention is directed to whether or how the technology succeeds in projecting the compositional ambition.

2.2. Wider context

Interestingly, in his seminal work The Production of Space, Lefebvre (Reference Lefebvre1991) already describes a science of space that alludes to what was described earlier as the political aspects of spatial audio, the attempts to conceal them and the simulation that ‘embodies at best a technological utopia, a sort of computer simulation of the future, or of the possible, within the framework of the real’ (ibid.: 9). Although we do not specifically focus on political aspects in this paper, the proposition by Lefevbre, in the case that his science of space holds true, plays well into the research approach that we describe in the next section: ‘There is a truth of space, an overall truth generated by analysis-followed-by-exposition … necessity of reversing the dominant trend towards fragmentation, separation and disintegration’ (ibid.). Part of our argument here is that much of the work in spatial audio that we can observe, particularly in the commercial field, lacks the introductory step of ‘analysis’: how does the spatial property of sound expose itself, and how may we develop means to understand it, both experientially and semantically? As Lefebvre states a few pages later: ‘Space considered in isolation is an empty abstraction’ (ibid.: 12).

Consequently, when considering the capabilities on which spatial sound and audio perception are based, it is useful to also take into account how we dwell in space, how spaces are always a place (rather than an empty abstractions) and that a kind of skill and knowledge of how to negotiate these relationships underpins a musical relationship to space. The cognitive and cultural bases of these principles are well elucidated by Tuan, who states that

Here the interrelationship between kinaesthetic and sensorial ability in the experience of auditory space and its mental or articulatory access becomes evident and emphasises that listening provides a necessary dimension of space ‘frequently overlooked in the ocularcentric culture of late modernism’ (Cook Reference Cook and Born2013: 225).

In a scope wider than the musical and auditory domain, space and place are always co-constructed and co-felt, and function to bracket direct experience on a pre-personal level. The tension generated by the duality between space and place in composed artistic environments (concert halls, studios, galleries) is quite potent. As part of an artistic approach, their superposition may contribute to a specific intensity of experience.

Nevertheless, the fact that space can be abstract but places remain tied to lived experience is also an important distinction for the experience of spatial sound and music. Casey’s insight into the agency of places is relevant in this regard:

The place of experience situates us on a bodily level, and also serves as an underlying layer for the inscription of imaginative and remembered affects, sensations and associations; this in addition to the foregrounded experience of sound, music and spatial sound gestures. This raises the question as to whether the shift from space to place also occurs in musically structured environments, and if it does, how does it operate? Norman talks about the connectedness that arises through shared listening situations where place is generated ‘in “repositioning” [the] listeners collectively – embodied and emplaced by performance’ (Norman Reference Norman2012). This statement emphasises that places are also central in carrying social relatedness, which extends to the spaces of sounding and listening together, and centrally structures the listener’s relations to the sonic environment and its embedded sounds.

3.1. Inquiry procedure

The method developed by the authors for the listening workshops relies on a basic qualitative open-coding method, albeit in a quite free implementation (Auerbach and Silverstein Reference Auerbach and Silverstein2003). The main objective was to create a context for listening that allowed the participants to hear and identify the spatial properties of individual sounds in the spaces we had chosen. The workshop method was continually developed over the course of the three iterations, and the general outline consisted of the four steps described in the following subsections.

3.2. Listening to the space

In the first workshop phase, two groups were each assigned to two nearby spaces. The instruction to the participants was to visit each place and to listen attentively for key sonic aspects of the place that provided information about it. The chosen places were in public architectural sites or open urban or peri-urban environments that displayed enhanced and layered distances, volumes or superpositions of sources. The tasks included clarifying the point of listening, the place of listening and the way sonic events are able to describe the space to the listener, for example. The instructions to the participants were quite brief: ‘Find a location within the space, close you eyes and listen attentively for five minutes, paying attention to spatial aspects of the sonic environment.’ Immediately following these listening exercises the group convened in situ and discussed the experiences for another five to ten minutes, making direct reference to the key sonic elements while still in the same place.

3.3. Describing the space

In the next phase, after the listening excursions, the two groups gathered and each member of the group gave descriptions of their listening experience, either a specific articulation of space, such as ‘the hammer hitting the steel bar’,Footnote ² or more general impressions, such as the way sound projected in the visited spaces. This discussion gradually turned to a mapping exercise where we attempted to conceptualise the specific experiences of the participants into a collection of terms, which was subsequently ordered in a two-dimensional grid according to a principle negotiated in the group.

The terms surfacing in the first workshop were ‘familiarity’, ‘resonance’, ‘meditation’, ‘discomfort’, for example (Figure 1). In the discussion, attempting to order the collected terms into coherent categories, the two axes factual–metaphorical and descriptive (detached)–feeling came to the foreground, allowing an organisation of the terms around the twin processes of hearing–listening.Footnote ³

Figure 1.

Map with participant-provided terms created during the workshop in November 2023 in Helsinki.

Terms articulated in the most recent workshop included ‘representation’, ‘indexality’, ‘evidence’ and ‘disappointment’, to name only a few (Figure 2). This time the ordering was done in a ‘mind-mapping’ manner, by grouping terms according to similarity or thematic and conceptual affinity; the word groups themselves were also distributed in neighbourhoods of meaning, i.e., using these simple diagrammatic processes as sense-making devices (Ljungberg Reference Ljungberg2012). The three central terms experience, memory, imagination were then also juxtaposed with ‘knowledge, understanding and sense-making’ on the one hand, and ‘past, present and future’ on the other.

Figure 2.

Map with participant-provided terms from the workshop in April 2024 in Stockholm.

These collections of terms that in and of themselves conceptualise an experience of space in sound should obviously not be considered general and exhaustive listings, but rather as an intermediate stage from which a more universal understanding may emerge. As we gather more data from upcoming workshops, a wider range of methods may be used to connect existing conceptual frameworks to experience. A further discussion on the terms explored in these workshop discussions will follow in the next subsection.

3.4. Recreating and imagining the space

The third phase of the workshops focused on the attempt to imagine how the sensations of the space just experienced might be recreated. Questions posed to the participants included What kind of tools would be needed and did they already exist? and Is there a need for new technologies for spatialisation? This was carried out in a speculative design (Houlden and Veletsianos Reference Houlden and Veletsianos2023) exercise, where the participants were asked to come up with imaginative scenarios that could contribute to novel approaches to working with and in spatial audio.

Design fictions appears to be a useful method for this task in that they ‘create a speculative space in which to raise questions about whether a particular technology is desirable’ (Cox Reference Cox2021). For the third research question stated previously, on how the experience of space may be articulated and translated, these design fictions turned out to be useful. Resulting fictions were ‘a magical device that produces a map’ and ‘a device that can turn memory into sound’, for example. Some of these results are discussed in more detail later.

The imaginative transformation of perceived, remembered and shared listening situations immediately after the original listening experience was an important method step. It enabled the activation of listening and musicianship skills, while at the same time allowing participants to stay attuned to the question of spatiality in sound. It also enabled the identification of a spatial foundation of sonic experience through amplified and transformed sensations by actively imagining their recreation.

3.5. Methodological development

In parallel to the phases carried out during the workshop, the authors were engaged in intense discussions on methodological development. As with any experimental process, the goals and the ways to achieve them remained in flux throughout the process of enquiry. Goals shift due to new insights and how work phases fail or can successfully be carried out, and contribute to a gradual clarification of the insights that may be achieved.

In this enquiry, the methodological development task was to organise the listening and articulation processes in order to enable a focus on access to the experience of space in the three different approaches and modalities: listening, articulation and imagination. In other words, the three phases of the model had to be tested and re-implemented throughout the three workshops in order to sharpen the focus on knowledge about spatial qualities in sound. These three phases are directly connected to the three research questions defined earlier. We believe that using this structure would also improve strategies for accessing perceptual qualities in spatial sound.

As of this writing, however, a comprehensive understanding of the outcomes of these enquiries is still emerging. Their value has become most apparent in exchanges with practitioners struggling to organise their musical spaces with a sensitive weighting of audio techniques and perceptual organisation in the ‘sound scenes’ they create. It is clear that the different steps in these workshops have resulted in a few concrete and related insights:

• Listening with an explicit focus on spatial cues in different environments reveals information about the way sounds project, define and characterise a space that can appear surprising or novel to the participants.

• Discussing and conceptualizing the listening experience can give rise to useful terms outlining and sharpening said experience, albeit not terms that provide a general understanding.

• A close linking of direct experiential access to coherent sonic environments with almost embedded propositional articulation processes shifts any terminological categorisation away from abstract, high-level descriptions towards articulation that builds a bridge between immediate, embodied, elemental sensations and their possible crystallisation in language.

• Thinking about how to recreate the previously experienced and heard spaces makes it evident that most available tools are insufficient to do justice to the multidimensional phenomena at play in sonic environments, that is, it shows that re-reproduction or simulation of the spatial aspects of these environments is almost impossible.

• The use of a design-fiction exercise shows that new approaches to creating musical works are possible, leaving the question open as to how to fold them back into concrete artistic workflows.

• Speculative or imagination-based approaches give priority to experience in spatial sound, and alleviate some of the dominance of the purely technical, parametric treatment of space in musical creation.

The exploratory development of this method is still ongoing. It needs to be further extended to include procedures for evaluation, analysis and interpretation in a more systematic operationalisation of the experience-first framework. Continuing this research work through a range of analytical and interpretative approaches will enable a more detailed integration of perspectives related to our theoretical framework.

4.1. Mismatched expectations

During the listening workshop in Stockholm in April 2024 we made an interesting observation regarding the relation between a recent listening excursion and its documentation and playback. We brought first- and third-order Ambisonics microphonesFootnote ⁴ to some of the sites, and recorded the sonic environment while we were listening. It should be noted that we did not spend much time optimising the conditions for the recordings, and this obviously had an effect on the result. We merely set up the microphones and recorded onto a laptop or portable recorder. Later, in the group discussions, towards the end of the step labelled describing the space (see section 3.3), the idea was raised to playback the recordings as a means of reinforcing the memory of the experienced spaces and places. The recordings were decoded and played back into a 29.4 dome-like configuration of speakers already present in the concert hall that served as the venue for the workshop. Despite the lack of care taken with the recordings, the playback conditions were technically not far from optimal and the system appeared to be relevant for the reproduction of spatial audio surround recordings with relatively high fidelity. The universal rejection of the recording by the group as something that had at most only a very vague resemblance to the collective memory of the experienced sonic environments was rather dramatic and unanimous. As a preliminary analysis, the rejection and demonstrated mismatch does not necessarily say much about the quality of the recordings, nor about the equipment and infrastructure used for playing them back. Nevertheless, before any conclusions can be drawn from this insight, more work needs to be done experimenting with better recordings, better equipment, more preparation and production time. Another possibility is to explore different moments at which the recording is introduced back into the various phases of the method.

4.2. Space versus place, and spatial relationality

Apart from the obvious difference between natural listening and a technically captured sound environment, this mismatch is indicative of the fact that the experience of a place’s sonic space consists of more than the distributed sound events and their associated acoustic effects. One may claim that the engagement with sound, space and experiential place that these listening exercises elicit is not entirely compatible with the affordances of spatial audio technologies. The experience of a sonic relation is embedded and situated in the encounter with a place containing multiple layers of perceptions, sensations and stories. Hence one of the first experiential aspects is that of how the listener is situated, in both their personal trajectory and the immediate environment of the place. The mismatch between the experienced and recorded place that we observed may also have something to do with the concentrated listening exercises, through which attentive listening to the spatial properties of a place and the subsequent discussions and attempts to conceptualise the experiences of space create a particularly heightened involvement with the place and its sonic identity. This intense experience of the place, with its dense and layered experiential dimensions, was obviously not matched by listening to the recordings, which serves as a clear example of the difference between primary versus mediated experience. Another way to consider this discrepancy is between production and re-production. At any rate this insight resonates with both the first and the third research questions. ‘Production’ of space is what Lefebvre (Reference Lefebvre1991) identifies as a social act, as perceived, conceived and lived space – from a phenomenological position it is seen as the ‘bringing forth of the world’ (Varela et al. Reference Varela, Thompson and Rosch1991) through an enacted, inextricable relation to each place. ‘Re-production’ of a spatial scene or place is a mediated process that is transported in time and space through technical means. It is premised on the viability of its interpretation as the simile of an actual experience – a cultural technique (Mauss Reference Mauss1973; Winthrop-Young Reference Winthrop-Young2013). Thus the relation to space cannot only be a ‘re-presentation’, but requires an active ‘material encounter’ (Nelson Reference Nelson2015), whose resistance entails that we leverage our habitual practices and ways of relating. Nelson’s insight ‘that space and body are intertwined through proprioception, and … allow us to encounter space as a material’ (ibid.: 10) points to one of the reasons for the mismatch in the technically mediated synthetisation of sonic spaces: proprioception, the sense of being there, as located in the body, is not transported by the recording and diffusion technology. However, in the case of presenting spatial sound as a musical performance, space is both created and re-created, generating a new experience that may not mimic another one, but that builds on the techniques and abilities to work with and understand artificially constructed sonic and musical environments.

4.3. Biases and silent assumptions

The enquiry, as it was designed, carried out and refined across the three iterations, is based on a few assumptions that were implicit from the outset, but have become more evident through the process. Listening to the spatial aspects of sounds in architectural or outdoor spaces is more common and therefore more accessible than doing the same thing in the optimised and highly artificial architectural venues such as the concert hall, the studio, the black box, or the white cube. Part of what this investigation aims to achieve is to bring to the foreground spatial aspects that are more prominent in ‘natural’ sonic environments and establish (terminological, procedural, perceptual and experiential) approaches to working with them in artistic projects and processes. The necessity for these clarifications and new conceptual and procedural tools arises mostly from our frustration with the discrepancy between the promises of technological advances and the failure of these tools to deliver a coherent multidimensional sensorial experience beyond conventional sound projection in concerts or sound installations. In addition, as creators of sonic experiences in mediated formats and constructed places, a deeper understanding of the experiential dimension of spatiality can enhance our chances of achieving the desired artistic and aesthetic outcomes.

As also touched on earlier, the reliance on language as a working medium in describing spatial properties in sound is by no means trivial. Habituated as we are to naming things, the descriptive mode provides a well-known and useful way of exchanging the elements and aspects of an experience. Musicians, and particularly the academically trained artists who took part in these investigations, already possess a vocabulary that originates from the various forms and types of academic musical training they have gone through. However, even before collecting the language elements and establishing some kind of descriptive system, the limitations in language use, or rather the variability in articulation ability between different participants, needs to be considered. Levels of experience and the individual mixture of different types of expertise in the participants, as well as the specific ease of use of the idiomatic language prevalent in the latter phases of the method, also play a central role. The level of language proficiency is often silently assumed not to matter.Footnote ⁵ Consequently, it is important to acknowledge that this well-established mode of language use does not necessarily fulfil the need for exploration and synthesis of insights in relation to a sonic spatial experience.

4.4. Mapping

The workshop phase following the communicative exchange about the listening experience, either in small groups in situ or in the larger group, prepared the participants for the collection of terms, though no other instructions or rules were given. The open-coding processes that arose were mainly embedded in the mapping processes. As part of the articulation phase, the maps evolved from an unstructured collection and discussion of terms into a negotiation about classification or grouping according to the (sometimes associative) connections between the terms. By no means a linear process, the mapping exercises took on different intensities and orientations, depending on the focus of each group, but the descriptive and personal reporting of the experience gave rise to an axial organisation (Figure 1). The more detailed and better instructed later workshop process produced a more complex and interwoven organisation of terms, as seen in the second map (Figure 2).

From a methodological development perspective it is noteworthy that the additional time dedicated to the second mapping process is clearly reflected in the density of the outcome, but not necessarily in its clarity. The legibility of the maps in terms of terminological categories and their logical structure benefits from a simpler organisation model, such as a coordinate system with two dimensions.

The terms pivotal to the first map were hearing–listening. They provided the anchor points in a terminological space between the objective–subjective poles of description and feeling, as well as facts and metaphors. The first hurdle in finding articulations about spatial aspects of sonic environments is to balance literal description and abstraction or emotion/affect. Since one of the central aims of this investigation is to gain access to subjective experience of space in sound, clarifying what the articulation refers to becomes essential. When asking about experience, the question should be ‘What is it like to experience …?’ rather than ‘What is it you hear/listen to?’ (Petitmengin Reference Petitmengin2007). Concentrating on familiarity, resonance, meditation and discomfort as detailed elements of the map, it is clear that these terms demonstrate how reflection and higher-level ordering already form part of the terms offered by the participants. Each of these terms speaks of experiential impacts while listening and activating the state or sensation described.

The terms central to the second map were experience, memory and imagination, and they reflect the structure of the workshop to some extent. They also represent the outcome of an ordering and analytical process that was already occurring during the term-finding discussions in the first workshop. But more directly reported items can be associated to each of these three core terms, to experience situated in flow, situated in time, more-than-sound, contained-ness, pressure, dense, dynamics; to memory indexality, representation, evidence, truth, making sense and separation; and to imagination transformation into a musical piece, gate/bridge/mediation, expectation/disappointment. And overall, the already mentioned triples knowledge, understanding, sense-making on the one hand and past, present, future on the other indicated a strong conceptual framing imposed from a higher level. Overall, the encapsulating nature of these key words, standing in for insights by individual members of the group, then shared through explanations and finally captured as placeholders in a vast constellation of meanings, gives this map a somewhat cryptic or encoded character. Re-reading the map, or navigating it without reference to the conversations that occurred during the process is more than an act of interpretation, it is one of speculation, of associating meanings to terminological nodes that may not have been present during the group’s initial engagement with the task of articulating terms.

The value of these maps should therefore not be overestimated. They represent the outcomes of situated processes with distinct groups of participants. As such, their form is contingent to the time, persons and locations that framed the precise moment of their making. They represent to some extent a singular constellation of people, dialogues, conversations and experiences; a typical configuration found in qualitative research approaches that address subjective, experiential and social dimensions. And realistically, from this perspective, the maps cannot provide universally applicable structures and terminological organisations.

Nevertheless, the second-level ordering that occurred during the mapping processes, in the first case finding a coordinate system, and in the second finding three core concepts as an ordering principle, speaks to the utility of collective thought and articulation processes. Serving as a basis for further iterations of the investigation, the principles active during the processes, rather than the specifics present in their traces, form the core insights of this process.

4.5. Speculative design processes

The third workshop phase had as its central principle imagination not bound by convention, which was an exercise loosely based on the method of design fiction (Cox Reference Cox2021; Holzer et al. Reference Holzer, Holzapfel and Frisk2021). As a principle more time-consuming and complicated to carry out, but also more rewarding on different levels, this approach created an opening onto the problems and frustrations at the source of this investigation.

In this phase, while working in pairs, the participants’ task was to develop an approach allowing the re-creation of the experience of space in sound, or the spatial experience lived in the sonic environment. Although few of the groups managed to stay within the parameters of the task (many using their imagination to completely escape the constraints of either urban listening situations or cultural production spaces), the scenarios, imagined apparatuses or processes that were presented offered valuable insights into novel elements or ways of integrating space into musical, sonic or social creation processes.

In the first example already mentioned, the group imagined ‘a magical device that produces a map’ and ‘a device that can turn memory into sound’, thus creating ‘a liminal space, [while] remaining flexible’ (Mills Reference Mills2019).Footnote ⁶ It bent sonic experience back into its representation – making it temporally displaced, entirely based on memory – and changed the medium of representation into a map, albeit in an abstract form. This speculative design attached itself to the elements of the preceding process, and tried to re-imagine them in a ‘magical’ mode. Taking a big step away from any concrete processes, the model nevertheless tried to address the investigation at hand directly.

The next group expanded the task and came back to propose ‘music-making as a utopian activity that translates subjective experience’, a cultural role that music has always fulfilled to some extent. This group’s interpretation of the speculative task refers back to ‘a new technology: music’, without specific instructions or alterations to the notion of what this means. The emphasis on the ways this role is newly defined makes this speculative proposal reach beyond given conventions and boundaries. Its application in actual creative processes becomes highly contingent on engaging with an extensive interpretation process, thus reassigning listening and music-making as principally experiential in themselves.

Another group proposed to ‘engineer’ a social situation of listening, where an immersed listener who is exposed to an actual sonic environment is interrupted by an accompanying person. This disruption forces the listener to ‘snap out of it’, which for a short moment permits other agents to alter the environment, by adding sonic or spatial elements, and present a newly layered experience of sonic space to the listener. While oscillating between deep immersion, disruption and re-immersion with an increasingly layered sonic space, this proposal centres on the listener’s ability to remember and reconstitute the experience in an intensified manner, thus ‘filling the gradual puzzle of time’.

Finally, one group proposed a musical instrument with 800 speakers and three symphony orchestras present in a place permeated by outside sounds originating from nature in a transparent manner. With this instrument the proponents would then ‘transcribe the soundscape’ as a ‘recreation of a recreation of a recreation’. This speculative maximalism maintains the creative act of composition at its core, while again creating layers of experience through transcription into a so-called ‘score’.

The ensuing discussion with the larger group revealed important ways in which the participants were thinking about the spatial and sonic aspect of the experienced places. Core statements included the observation that ‘non-visual space doesn’t reveal itself, except over time’, and that ‘space grows’ – possibly referring to an insight about spatial sound when stating that ‘in a built space, everything is present at the same time, imprisoned by the architectural space’, and that the processes of spatial sound operate through an ‘unveiling over time [that] reveals space, sounds reveal space’.

Concerning the method of speculation, participants’ opinions fluctuated between seeing the ‘limits of speculation [and staying] pragmatic in the realm of the possible’ and the ‘ease of collective speculation – [to] trace a line between things’ as a mode of developing a joint understanding of the field under speculation. They also noted the necessity to ‘frame in order to create experiences’, and to consider speculation as an essential tool that may serve as a starting point for deeply human ways of operating such as ‘absurdity, humour, storytelling’ – all of these also considered cultural ‘survival tools’.

To the authors, one of the successful outcomes of this last phase was the deliberate shift away from imagining any sort of digital audio processes: scenarios detached from conventional spatial organisations were proposed, as well as the interchangeability of sound and space. The outcomes therefore also disproved the expectation that tools and instruments of current electronic music production would play a role in the imagined processes.

4.6. Language, verbal definitions, memory, relations

There are a few critical steps that may need further evaluation, but we believe that the method developed here may still lead to interesting results. The most obvious aspect is perhaps the relation between language and first-person experience. What is the relation between an individual sensation of spatial properties in sound and the rendering of this sensation in language? Can there be a meaningful linguistic description of the experience of space that promotes the communication of said experience? Although there is not a traditional opposition between a musical experience and its verbal description, there is at least a conflict. Consciously developing terminology for the experience of spatial aspects of sonic events through discussion appears to deliver concepts with some relevance, at least locally.

The second challenging aspect, clearly connected to the first, is how to identify core ideas and effects in spatial sound. This identification undoubtedly happened in the workshops, and there were several examples of how everyday, almost mundane sounds propagated the experience of interesting spatial effects. It is equally evident that these led to verbal definitions and concepts that could be critically discussed in the group. This discussion was not just limited to the validity of the descriptors, but also included comparison between different kinds of events and the emergence of new descriptors.

Third, the impact of memory was revealed not only through the feedback loop of experience, activated memory in situ and re-activated but also referential experience, for example through recordings or speculative design; in the discussion too, references were often made to related experiences of spatiality in sound, the verbalisation of which provided the participants with tools to both describe and understand. The frequent mention of memory clearly indicates that it plays a central role in all the reports about the three phases of listening, articulating and speculating about spatial sonic experiences by the participants. In the first map this is mainly discussed in terms of reflection, whereas in the second, memory is a central aspect through which other aspects were understood. Finally, a core element of the experience of space in sound is the spatial relationship of the listener with the environment, the sound events and their evocations, the sense of place and of being present. How a sound event is positioned with regard to the listener carries no semantic meaning but forms part of the sensation of place. The sense of proximity and distance, the presence of a sound event in the frontal field – ‘facing the listener’ – are all aspects that constitute a relationship, diffuse perhaps, but as an intrinsic part of the experience.