Electroacoustic music has always been at the forefront of redefining how music can be created and listened to through technology. It is also for this reason that it sits outside the realm of mainstream music listening, as not all people are interested in doing the work required to entertain such explorations. Yet ideas originated from the electroacoustic populates the current mainstream scene. For years, Pop and EDM genres have been obsessed with exploring new timbres while relying on traditional harmonies and rhythms to appeal to the masses. As the future of commercial audio technology is approaching immersive sound, space as a music parameter will inevitably be explored in how mainstream music will be made. This paper summarizes such explorations currently existing in electroacoustic music as outlined in Enda Bates’ Doctoral Thesis at the University of Dublin (2009), hoping to provide insights on how space can be integrated into mainstream music production other than ‘adding reverb’.
Unlike timbre, melody, harmony, and rhythm, space is a much broader music parameter that relates to “dimensions of individual sound objects, the relationships between sound objects and the relationship between the sound objects and the acoustic space in which they are heard (Bates, 2009, p1).” It’s therefore useful to look at space in terms of utility for clarity. One such function of space would be “to make complexity intelligible” (Harley, 1997, p.75). The spatial separation of different sound sources permits more intelligibility compared when they are all grouped in one spot. Composers such as Charles Ives, Henry Brant, and John Cage are composers whose work makes use of this approach. In Ive’s ‘The Unanswered Question’ for example, three distinct and harmonically and rhythmically dissonant musical layers of strings, woodwinds and brass are separated spatially to facilitate intelligibility of the piece as a whole (Bates, 2009).
Another way electroacoustic composers utilize space is through the repetition of spatial motifs. This is evident in German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen’s work Kontakte, in which “rotation, looping, alternation” are extensively exploited by recording a rotating speaker with four encircling microphones and playing back with a quadrophonic loudspeaker arrangement around the audience. His main goal here is to achieve a “serialization of angular direction” of the sound sources (Bates, 2009, p. 212).
Towards the end of the 20th century, Denis Smalley developed what is known as ‘the theory of spectromorphology’ as an attempt to create a unified aesthetic framework for listening to electroacoustic music, as traditional restrictions of timbre, rhythm, and harmonies no longer in existence (Smalley, 1997). In it, he stresses that any perceived sound can be viewed as a form of a physical gesture, which he terms as ‘gestural surrogacy’. The characteristics of such surrogacies can be analyzed by looking at its ‘trajectory’, which includes “onset, continuant, and termination” (Smalley, 1997), similar to an ADSR envelop. This profile of spectromorphology of a given sound object can be used as an organizing principle for its movements inside a spatialized music composition (Bates, 2009). This is the foundation of what Bates calls a gestural approach to spatial composition.
On the side of spatial music instruments, augmented instrument is an approach to link an instrument performer’s musical gesture to the spatial gesture of a given composition (Bates, 2009). An augmented instrument often consists of a preexisting musical instrument, such as a guitar or a violin, with additional hardware to enable spatial or timbral signal processing. One such device is the polyphonic pickup, which outputs individual signal channels for different strings in a string instrument. This could enable the creation of a spatialized composition using a surround speaker array; or be used with software plugins to be additionally processed for different spectromorphology profiles (Bates, 2009).
In conclusion, the research for spatial music composition techniques is still relatively minimal and restricted to the realm of electroacoustics. With the newly object-based distribution formats such as Dolby Atmos, MPEG-H, creators are granted more permission in the spatializing of sound objects. It seems from Bates’ thesis that the theory of spectromorphology is a good way of organizing spatial gestures and musical gestures compositionally, yet how this could influence the composition of traditional musical genres, or perhaps informing the creation of a new spatial mainstream musical genre in the age of the immersive is still a relatively unknown world waiting to be explored.
Citations
Bates, E. (2009). The Composition and Performance of Spatial Music (Doctoral dissertation, Trinity College Dublin).
Harley, M. A. (1997). An American in Space: Henry Brant's" Spatial Music". American Music, 70-92.
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Smalley, D. (1997). Spectromorphology: explaining sound-shapes. Organised sound, 2(2), 107-126.