Letters

On Spatialization

Every epoch in the history of Western music has made its defining contributions to the art. We have seen the growth and elaboration of tonality in a variety of definitive styles, the emergence of the orchestra to the point of its becoming as important a dimension in advanced tonal music as the pitch structure itself, the revolutionary discoveries of the various modes of composing without relying on the resources of tonality, the advanced instrumental techniques that take advantage of expanded orchestral textures as the primary musical resource, and finally the development of electronic instruments to manipulate traditional sounds or generate completely new ones as the fundamental musical material.

Each of these developments evolved out of the preceding ones. It is my conviction that our epoch's contribution to the ongoing sea changes in Western music is an evolution of electronic music (in all its forms) that opens up a dimension that has always been a part of music performance but now, with the development of highly sophisticated software and the ever more common use of multi-channel amplifications systems in concert halls, is available to the composer as a structural and expressive resource. This dimension is, of course, space and the spatialization of musical sound.

I'm not referring to the commercial/cinematic use of "surround" sound, most of which merely adds rear-channel ambience to basically front stereo sources (and sometimes not even stereo). From what I read in the so-called "pro audio" magazines, the commercial musical scene is only just now beginning to wake up to the possibilities of using space in a more structural/organic manner, something that many of us have been doing for decades. The result, however, is that we are finally getting some first-class software that allows us to pursue ideas or invent entirely new concepts that were difficult or impossible to realize in the earlier years. An excellent example is software called AudioStage by a French group, Longcat; the user can not only move musical events around in a 3D space (assuming there is a sufficient number of physical audio outputs), but any number of differently sized spaces can be designed each of which with its own acoustic characteristics, and all of these are continuously available, including the possibility of utilizing several spaces simultaneously. (Other, more traditional spatial movement software, but developed to very high levels of precision and flexibility, are by Iosono and Flux IRCAM Tools. One of the genuine pioneers of spatialization software is Jean-Marc Duchenne [AcousModules] who provides a wide variety of conventional and, especially, unconventional modules that encourage experimentation and discovery.) This means that space, its changing acoustic characteristics and expressive potential, can become a fundamental part of musical structure.

What I refer to especially is the use of space in music as an expressive device. Space moves us. Finding ourselves in or directly observing huge spaces is often an overwhelming experience. We hear from mountain-climbers and sky-divers, or we know from such experiences as the classic "room with a view" or simply looking out over a vast panorama from a plateau, that in one way or another experiencing enormous spaces is breathtaking or overwhelming or humbling or whatever. We are moved, and often profoundly. A few years ago, I had the extraordinary experience of flying in a helicopter over the Grand Canyon, without doubt a high point of my life. You never forget things like that. So it is with any encounter with vast spaces. At the other end of the scale, we are moved negatively by small, tight spaces, and some people are so sensitive that they experience claustrophobia—elevators are not for them.

Spatialization techniques in electronic music allow us to mobilize those deep emotions in the service of musical thought. Or one can equally say the reverse: musical thought can be in the service of mobilizing the deep emotions aroused by space. We accomplish this by creating or generating the illusion of space for the listener. We can statically define different kinds of spaces by placing sound events at fixed specific points around the listener, orchestrated with other audio cues such as reverberation. And we...