This is not the first issue of Organised Sound dedicated to spatial music and sonic art, but much has changed since the journal last focused on the topic (or more correctly, on multichannel music and audio) in 2010. In their editorial for that earlier issue, Jonty Harrison and Scott Wilson identified possible ‘trajectories of convergence’ between what they termed ‘absolutist’ and ‘relativist’ approaches to spatial sound practice – that is, between the quest for a precisely realised spatiality – requiring idealised listening conditions – and an approach based more on the listeners’ perception of spatial motion and behaviour. A decade and a half later various kinds of convergence continue to be evident, particularly in the way that spatial sound is becoming a common point of interest across different disciplines; but there is also a divergence of trajectories (or perhaps better, a proliferation) as spatial music discourse broadens from a focus on how to do spatial audio (and how to do it well) to questions of who gets to make spatial audio, where, for whom and – why? As Harrison and Wilson observed back then, this is a question we must never lose sight of; and in this present era of the all-pervasive ‘immersive experience’ understanding the why of spatial sonic art seems more pressing than ever.
In recent years, the scope of inquiry in spatial sound studies has matured to become an interplay of technological, ecological, social, philosophical, political and artistic concerns (among others), driven in part by the fact that spatial sound is no longer the exclusive domain of electroacoustic composition; it now permeates cinema, gaming, theatre, installation art, VR, popular music and more, both transforming and being transformed by the contexts in which it exists. As this multiplicity of contexts and functions makes evident, aural space (i.e., spatial sound as experienced) is not neutral or objective: it pushes back, transforms as it is handled and carries with it the imprint of context, history and intention. The title of this issue, ‘Perspectives and Trajectories in Spatial Music and Sonic Art’, speaks both to this plurality of manifestations and to the proliferation of paths now being opened up by artists, researchers, technologists and listeners.
Central to this new relationship with spatial sound is an understanding of human experience, and several authors in this issue explore different ways of considering spatial listening as an entry point to interpretation, memory, and imagination. Boutard, Guastavino and Fraisse tackle the problem of documenting sound art installations in an experientially meaningful way. Through interactive listening sessions and participant interviews, they consider how spatial audio recordings of sound installations might serve as tools for preservation and study that work across different disciplines and listening strategies. Frisk and Schacher note the lack of shared language for articulating how aural space is perceived and experienced. In response, they document a participatory method in which workshop participants engaged in directed tasks of listening, verbal reflection and speculative reimagining, treating language not as a neutral descriptor but as an active means of negotiating and communicating spatial experience. For Catena, the experience of spatial sound is the basis for a detailed understanding of the ‘composed spatial traits’ of sound works. His concepts of ‘spatial reduced listening’ (a phenomenological approach to spatial sound extending Pierre Schaeffer’s concept) and ‘spatial relativism’ (understanding spatial placement and movement from the listener’s point of view) provide a listener-centric and experiential perspective on spatial music analysis.
One of the fascinating aspects of the present state of spatial sonic art is the growth of interdisciplinary approaches, with a commensurate development of the breadth, richness and complexity of spatial sound studies. Balbontín and Klenner conceptualise this complexity as a rhizomatic genealogy of sound space. Using interviews with practitioners across architecture, art and engineering they show how spatial listening spans disciplines and disturbs fixed definitions and identities. This idea finds practical expression in Herndon and Fowler’s Biophilic Instrument Pavilion (BIP), which integrates spatial sound, light and environmental material into a site-responsive installation/instrument spanning music, architecture and ecology. Loveless and Bhagat discuss a different kind of genealogy, tracing the racialised and colonial logics that flow through the Modernist tradition of purpose-built spatial audio environments, from Xenakis and Le Corbusier’s Philips Pavilion (1958) through to the present-day EMPAC in Troy, NY. Offering a critique of a recent immersive sound-art exhibition at EMPAC, they argue that, even when such facilities host work that seeks to challenge marginalisation and colonial power, the ideology behind the design of these facilities may work against the intentions of the artists who work there. The values embodied in such buildings – such as spatial precision, control of material and the supremacy of composer authority – arguably reinforce established ideas of centralised power and colonial dominance.
Given this criticism of the power structures and hierarchies of spatial sound, how might we move beyond modernist ideas of control and release the potential of space to be an open, emergent, empowering and transformative aspect of sonic art? Several authors address this question directly. Stefánsdóttir and Franzson discuss their project an Urban Archive as an English Garden, an installation/instrument which uses real-time Wavefield Synthesis in a soundscape context. Exploring the more-than-human potential of technologically mediated spaces, they seek to escape the constraints of the compositional precision privileged by ‘Western listening culture’ and move towards an open-ended situation where performer navigation and visitor movement collaboratively shape the sonic and spatial experience. For Har, this sense of openness can be found in traditional Japanese aesthetics and the concept of ma (‘space’, ‘interval’, ‘pause’) and he presents case studies illustrating how six different composers have worked consciously with this concept. The spiritual dimension of ma – the ‘boundlessness [that] is experienced in the diminishing presence of boundaries’ – parallels Romero’s dissolution of boundaries between composer, material, and listener. Drawing particularly on relational space theory (among others), Romero challenges traditional notions of composer control that seek to impose a single, overriding identity, advocating instead for relativistic spatial experiences that emerge from the agency of sound materials, listener and composer, and are contingent upon their interactions. Rose addresses similar questions, but from a first-person perspective. Her distinctive approach allows for the emergence of personal memories and emotional states through embodied interaction, promoting personal agency and allowing each individual’s unique experience to shape the musical outcome. She demonstrates the transformative, even healing power of spatial music, using trauma-informed practices to advocate for spatial music as a therapeutic medium.
While this emerging (and long-overdue) emphasis on the openness and inclusivity of spatial sound practice has fascinating political and social dimensions, it also raises intensely practical questions. Sonic art’s liberation from the institutional studios of the twentieth century may have brought about a measure of much-needed democratisation and accessibility, making it – at least in theory – more inclusive, diverse and participatory, but spatial sound in particular remains specialised, mysterious, prohibitively expensive and, consequently, out of reach to many. Two articles – the OTTOsonics project of Mitterhuber, Tomás and Kaltenbrunner and the Open Ambisonics Toolkit (OAT) of Pisano and Lindborg – respond to this ‘democratisation’ challenge in different ways, but both show how community-driven, DIY approaches can transform spatial audio from an academic privilege into an accessible creative medium. OAT aims to demystify ambisonics for students and practitioners, combining low-cost consumer hardware with open-source software to create a kind of pedagogical toolkit, underpinned by tutorials and listener evaluations. OTTOsonics addresses a similar but distinct need, that for an affordable and practicable system for public events which is adaptable to a variety of venue types and musical genres. It achieves this through 3D-printed speaker cabinets and custom amplifier circuits, and by releasing their schematics, code and documentation, they empower users to customise, hack, repair, learn about and evolve the systems and their use. Lindgren approaches both access and agency from the performer’s perspective, describing the development of a hybrid digital/acoustic stringed instrument, the EV. This integrates spatialisation directly into the synthesis process, empowering the instrumentalist to explore space as an essential component of performance.
Finally in this issue, Caitlin Woolsey discusses the audiopoetry of Henri Chopin (1922–2008) and specifically its live performance. Though Woolsey’s focus is not sound space per se, her article contains an account of Henri’s unrealised and unpublished thought experiment ‘Le silence lance l’air’ (1961), which is written about here for the first time. This work was conceived for an imagined theatre comprising seven levels with multiple rotating platforms on which spectators would be seated, with movements, lighting and sound responding to the heart rate of the audience: ‘a space that becomes the work’.
As the articles presented here ably demonstrate, spatial sonic art has entered an exciting new era of diversity, plurality and interdisciplinarity. It is no longer sufficient to view the spatial aspect of sonic art purely as a musical parameter, compositional technique or engineering problem; it must be understood as an embodied, relational and even political act. The articles collected here engage with space as an active medium of creative and critical sound practice, a medium that challenges established hierarchies and is open, inclusive and empowering. Spatial sound emerges as a form of aural ‘transmaterial’, possessed of tangible material qualities yet somehow transcending its own materiality: it holds meaning and offers resistance; it can be shaped, transferred, contested; it is entangled in networks of power, discourse and affect. In treating spatial sound as something to be involved in rather than simply rendered and received, the authors here continue a journey towards a more materially attuned, politically aware, and ecologically grounded spatial audio discourse. Seen in this way, spatial sound becomes not just a way of listening, but also a way of thinking, of being – and of acting.
