A guest blog by Dr Timothy Cooper, Susan Manning Postdoctoral Fellow 2023-24 on a recent visit to the Spatial Audio Gathering conference at De Montfort University:
In June, I was able to visit De Montfort University; I’ve attended a student run conference in the past there called 'Sight Sound Space Play' and the current PhD cohort this year organised an excellent conference called 'Spatial Audio Gathering'.
At the conference, my colleague, baroque cellist Lucia Capellaro, performed my work 'Labyrinth', composed for baroque cello and multi-channel electroacoustic music. My composition work tends to be made in collaboration with professional musicians, which can be a disadvantage when it comes to presenting at conferences. Usually, the conference can’t offer any performance fees, even if they accept performances as submissions. This is fine if you’re collaborating with a colleague and the work is a shared research practice, or if your research is performance-based. But for those of us working with professional musicians, it can be hard to fundraise, as arts councils tend not to support academic conference attendance/performance, and conferences usually can’t support professional musicians. Some conferences will host performers and then expect that performance works are made especially for them, or that you may have an existing work that fits the bill. It can be tricky trying to work in this space if you are working with professional musicians, so it was a great opportunity for me that IASH were able to support Lucia and me to attend the conference and present my work. Thanks to the Institute for this opportunity to do something that can be very hard to achieve!
Generally, the conference was excellent. Spatial sound is a core part of my practice, as it is for many electroacoustic composers. Several contributors noted that theory in this area can be thin on the ground, partly because there are few musicologists interested in electroacoustic music; the musicology has therefore tended to come from the composers of the music, and most of us would prefer to spend time in the studio making music rather than writing about it. However, I think it goes deeper than this: it is so hard to really articulate the meaning of the spatial aspect of sound, as it is so intrinsically tied up in the characteristics of the sound. It is possible to analyse music from a spatial perspective, and this can be interesting and useful to do, but not every piece will reward this kind of approach.
For me, the most thought-provoking presentations came from Annie Mahtani and Brona Martin. Annie discussed the evolution of her approach to space from a philosophical and technical point of view, tracing her work in various formats from two loudspeakers through to her approach to the 100-speaker BEAST System she works with in Birmingham. One area that really struck a chord with me was her argument that the technical means is less interesting than the result. It is now quite easy to make a sound fly in circles around a speaker, but does that circular motion have anything to do with the other characteristics of the sound or the meaning of the work? In pieces of Annie’s that I’ve heard, they are more about the sensation of the space than the specific movement of the sound, and this is something that I think our work sometimes has in common and something that I am exploring through my postdoctoral research. In the case of Brona’s work, she presented the IKO loudspeaker, a single loudspeaker unit that has 20 small loudspeakers angled to recreate a fully 3-dimensional sound image in the right environment. The IKO allows the listener to hear sounds coming from in front, behind, above, and below, all in one reasonably compact unit. Brona told us the room we were in wasn’t ideal, as the IKO is better in more reverberant acoustics which create the 3D illusion more convincingly. Brona talked about various projects that used the IKO and the approach Greenwich University has taken to sharing the IKO. They are very open and supportive to researchers visiting to make use of the IKO and then taking it ‘on tour’ and that openness (shared by Birmingham) has made opportunities for artists who wouldn’t normally engage with academia from various backgrounds under-represented in our field - and that is a big positive. And Brona’s music she played us? Very beautiful!
The final round table was an interesting moment: some attendees wanted a stronger theoretical framework from which to hang their work. Others felt that such a framework could create even more confusion, so in the end, this was a conference with more questions at the end than answers, but all the right kinds of questions! Thanks to the organisers Stefano, Ian, Enrico and Teddy.