VERBALIZING SCULPTURAL SOUND PHENOMENA IN ELECTRONIC MUSIC –
TOWARDS A SHARED PERCEPTUAL SPACE (SPS)
08.12.2017 ZKM Karlsruhe, lecture hall.
This lecture is concerned with questions whether the aesthetics of spatialized electronic music of today takes into account the perception of its audience at all and how to find or generate terms that could be helpful for composition and analysis of spatialized sound. In this broad field we are dealing for some time now with spatial sound phenomena that not only come from a direction and head for a vanishing point in the concert or studio space. Rather these phenomena have spatial dimensions like proliferation, width, height etc. forming diverse sound masses that can penetrate, layer, move around each other and define by their properties – space itself. Thus, these phenomena are perceived by composers, scientists and audiences causing ‘something’ we call a shared perceptual space (SPS).
This space is in fact the main research object of the OSIL (Orchestrating Space by Icosahedral Loudspeaker) project and is defined as the inter-subjective space where the perception of composers, scientists and audience intersect. Following this, approaches and methodologies are introduced how to develop and derive a specific terminology on “sculpturality” for a certain way of spatial sound projection within the framework of the artistic research project. By this we intent to encourage the aesthetic discussion about space in spatial sound composition and therefore enlarge the compositional contingencies of this art.
