Letters

[Editor's note: Together with those in the previous issue, these letters to the guest editor constitute a forum of position statements on the theme of high-density loudspeaker arrays (HDLAs).]

New methodologies of composing and performing for sound environments that use HDLAs have begun to change the social construct of the performer-to-audience engagement. Many fixed sound systems in concert or venue settings confine the audience and bind the performer into static points within a contained space. Basic speaker configurations (stereo, quadraphonic, or octophonic arrays) are normally placed above seated or standing listeners, creating an invisible social hierarchy that could hinder the engagement of emitted sounds by performers with their listening participants.

Decentralizing the performers' presence while utilizing a larger number of spatial speaker positions, in this case with the 139-channel HDLA speaker configuration of the Virginia Tech Cube, could change the perspective of the performer or composer.

Composing sounds for an HDLA—along with encouraging the audience to choose its own vantage points rather than offering a set location in which to experience the work—has the potential to allow the participants to become more emboldened when choosing their own placement while engaging in the sonic environments. This gesture reassures the audience members that their perspective of each sound piece presented is equally as important as the perspective in which the piece was composed. It also enhances the listeners' interpretations of various audible articulations within a sound piece when they are able to choose their own focal points.

For the performers or composers, this type of approach would ideally force them to take into account the many varied perspectives that one may hear in their works, transforming their creative process from the composing of sounds that emit towards, and to the sides of, a large body of people, into an all-encompassing approach that engages all the social and political aspects of becoming equal bodies in a performance space.

Maria Chavez
Brooklyn, New York, USA

Access to low- (virtually zero-) cost recorded music at any location and at any time has created a hunger on the part of audiences for new kinds of musical experiences—experiences that go beyond what can be captured through a traditional stereo audio recording. Audiences crave unique, unrepeatable, and socially interactive experiences that require their participation and attention in ways beyond those typically demanded in passive concert-hall listening. HDLAs like the Cube at Virginia Tech offer the potential to create immersive experiences for audiences in a social setting.

Counterintuitively, one of the drawbacks to multispeaker venues—the expense—has an unintended positive side effect: The cost of these installations encourages their use as shared resources. Shared resources become potential sites of intentional collaboration and the proverbial chance encounters and "hallway conversations" among colleagues that so often yield unexpected cross-fertilizations across disciplines. Although the concept of a shared resource runs counter to the prevailing tendency toward miniaturization and personalization, it can provide a strong incentive for individuals to leave their personal virtual realities to participate in a more social, immersive experience in a shared space.

For large numbers of participants, an HDLA with surround screens is more cost-effective (and more computationally efficient) than equipping each audience member with a head-tracking headset and an individualized audio stream processed by a head-related transfer function (HRTF). Currently, the experience of through-air 3-D listening is more comfortable and realistic, though perhaps less immersive, than headphone listening with individualized head-tracking. Additionally, a shared HDLA venue offers the potential for incorporating new forms of social interaction and active participation into an immersive experience.

Carla Scaletti
Champaign, Illinois, USA

Space and spatialization have long played significant roles in musical conception and presentation. But it was the advent of electroacoustic music—to choose one term among several—that elevated space to one of the primary musical components, together with frequency, temporal, dynamic, and timbral aspects. Indeed, nearly from the outset, an overarching goal and vision of electroacoustic music has been envelopment, to articulate an immersive space—at once realistic and imaginative—around the listener.

HDLAs constitute the most recent immersive configurations for electroacoustic music. These large installations serve both as a...