Acousmatic Approaches to the Construction of Image and Space in Sound Art

Abstract

This article considers ideas of image and space as they apply to acousmatic music and to sound art, establishing overlaps and compatibilities which are perhaps overlooked in the current trend to consider these two genres incompatible. Two issues in particular are considered: compositional (especially mimesis and the construction of image, and what shall be termed ‘ephemeral narrative’) and presentational (in particular multichannel speaker deployment). While exploring several relevant works within this discussion, by way of a case study the article introduces the author’s GRIDs project – a series of four multichannel sound sculptures united in their arrangement in geometric arrays of many (in some cases potentially hundreds of) loudspeakers. These permit, by virtue of being so massively (and geometrically) multichannel, the generation of extremely intricate spatial sound environments – fabricated landscapes – that emerge directly from an acousmatic compositional aesthetic. Owing to their alternative means of presentation and presentation contexts, however, they offer very different experiences from those of acousmatic music encountered in the concert hall. So the latter part of this article explores the various ways in which the listener might engage with constructed image space within these sound sculptures, along with the relationship of the audio content of each with its visual and situational setup – that is, its environment.

The Acousmatic Gap as a Flexile Path to Self-Understanding: A case for experiential listening

“…There are many examples of researchers attempting to understand how people experience and make meaning from acousmatic sound (many of which are in the back issues of Organised Sound, including Atkinson 2007;Andean 2016;Barreiro 2010;Batchelor 2015;Godøy 2006;Kendall 2010;and Kim 2010). They ask, how is electroacoustic music experienced in the mind?…”