Space and Music

This article explores the practices associated with musical listening within the car. It does this in such a way that embraces Tia DeNora’s approach to the social study of music in conjunction with approaches broadly understood as ‘symbolic interactionism’. It focuses upon the musical elements partnered with social interaction that commonly occur with automobile commuter situations. Though, unlike most symbolic interactionist accounts of music that explore the social life of musical phenomena within performance contexts, the following grapples with the situation of musical experience removed from traditional performance contexts and significantly, as experienced without performing musicians. The following presents an interpretation of how music is deployed as an environmental feature of automobile commuting and how this ‘feature’ is deployed by commuters to transform the physical space of the car into a symbolic social space where those that occupy this context are afforded increased senses of comfort and control. I also, link listening practices in important ways to perceptions of the public and private dimensions of car travel.

In this article I discuss how people, as listening bodies in urban spaces, both passively (hearing) and actively (listening) engage with sound and unwanted noise. The uneven generation and perception of sound presents us with an important set of spatial, social, and physiological impacts. Our bodies are guided, damaged, invited, and otherwise shielded by invisible yet powerful forces. These forces have a broad patterning, what might be termed the sonic order of the city. Within the walls of homes, offices, and streets our experience is shaped both by natural sound and, more often, by orchestrated commercial practices such as in-store radio, muzak and the flows of rush hour traffic. This aural stage management takes places through the planning and relative containment of socially, commercially, and industrially sourced sound. This article discusses the broad relationship between these urban soundscapes and their influence on the trajectories of the human body to ask how sound and noise shape our experience and movement through the city.

Becoming commercially available in the mid 1960s, video quickly became integral to the intense experimentalism of New York City's music and art scenes. The medium was able to record image and sound at the same time, which allowed composers to visualize their music and artists to sound their images. But as well as creating unprecedented forms of audiovisuality, video work also producedinteractive spaces that questioned conventional habits of music and art consumption. This book explores the first decade of creative video work, focusing on the ways in which video technology was used to dissolve the boundaries between art and music.

Approaches to the multichannel spatialisation of electroacoustic music are described here with reference to musical case studies which focus upon the expressive functions of space and the theatricality of sound diffusion in an acousmatic context. A site-specific approach to spatialisation is proposed to enhance theatrical aspects of musical performance. Case studies include proposals for novel layouts of the diffusion system within the performance space and compositional techniques that are designed to re-evaluate our understanding of individual listening spaces.

Architecture and Music in stretto. Bricks of a Canon

History of architecture and history of music are rarely seen in close connection. This might be surprising as every music needs space and every space has a sound. However, music is usually analysed acoustically and architecture visually. In this article we select examples, where both music and architecture emerged in close relation: either the one inspired by the other or both conceived together.
While the musical sources from antiquity are too vague, throughout the entire European history from early medieval times onwards examples can be found, where both arts demonstrate a close relationship. Such building bricks of an architectural and musical history in stretto are: the Carolingian plan of the cloisters of St. Gallen together with the musical manuscripts from the library of St. Gallen, the Gothic cathedral Notre Dame de Paris and the music by Leonin, Perotin and Anonymous IV, the cathedral Santa Maria di Fiore of Florence and the Nuper rosarum lores by Guillaume Dufay, the castle of Versailles under Louis XIV and the various sorts of court music by Lully, Delalande and Couperin, the Musikvereinsgebäude in Vienna and the symphonies by Mahler, Le Corbusier’s and Xenakis’ Philips Pavilion in Brussels or the Philharmony in Luxembourg together with Penderecky’s eigth symphony – just to mention the most telling examples.
The result of this brief overview is that there have been historic moments when architecture and music were conceived in interdependence, one depending on the other; thus for the historian these moments can only be appropriately explained by analysing both arts together. But while examples of direct relationships between the two arts are rare, the more usual connection is via a common cultural context in which both arts act as a common cultural practice.

The tension between a realtime-oriented conception of music as a flow of emphemeral sounds or events, closely associated with the organicist metaphor, and a spatial or architectonic conception of musical relationships, emerging from the centuries-old “frozen architecture” metaphor, lies at the heart of the theory and analysis of musical form from its beginnings as an academic discipline in the mid-nineteenth century. Revisiting the controversial debate in historical music theories (Marx, Riemann, Schenker, Schoenberg, Kurth et al.) up to the “spatial turn” in new music aesthetics, the present essay argues for a close interdependency of spatial and temporal aspects in the analysis of musical form. Based on a perception- and performance-sensitive analytical approach, three main case studies from different epochs (Guillaume Dufay’s motet Nuper rosarum flores, Joseph Haydn’s symphonies Hob. I: 55, 86 and 91 and Edgard Varèse’s Arcana for orchestra) demonstrate the continuous impact and relevance of quasi-spatial “markers” in time as crucial aspects of a conception and perception of form while revealing evident transformational and processual qualities. By connecting these dimensions of formal “time-space” with historical discourses and contexts, the analyses aim at a convergence of speculative compositional practice and historically informed aesthetic experience.

In recent years, the expansion and use of mobile Internet and social media have changed live music engagement and fandom quite considerably. It has not only allowed fans to find and connect with each other at shows, but also to tweet and text concert set-lists and other information as they happen, thereby allowing non-attendees around the world to feel part of the event. This study examines the responses of fans engaged in this activity, identifying the key themes and patterns apparent within this behaviour, arguing that fans are using social media and mobile technology in an effort to contest and reshape the boundaries of live music concerts. It demonstrates how these online tools are involving fans that are not physically present at the show, seemingly incorporating them into the real-time “live” experience. This article explores how fans of prolific touring artists U2 and Tori Amos undertake this, with assigned concert attendees tweeting the set-list to online fans, where they gather to enjoy the show together, from the comfort of their computers.

The better quality pdf is downloadible from here: "http://www.leoalmanac.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/LEAVol19No3-Mailman.pdf
Through recent artistic practices and technology of interactive systems for music, composition and improvisation have more and more blended and interconnected with each other – a sui generis situation now called comprovisation. The concept of comprovisation applies equally well to the spontaneous generation and manipulation of computer graphics, especially as such graphics are systematically coordinated audio-visually, while being subject to spontaneous manipulation by a performer.
This is explained in terms of the Fluxations and FluxNoisations Human Body Interfaces, interactive dance systems that generate music and graphics spontaneously in response to hand and body movement. They enable spontaneous expressive shaping of coherent complexity and variety. Thus a multi-layered multimodal experience arises. The aesthetic experience of this multimedia spectacle relates to experiences of various prior music and visual art of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, as well as to hypothetical physical realities. Thus a kind of cybernetic phenomenology of art is pursued and enacted through an embodied cybersynthesis of art with simulated alternate reality. Call it a pragmatic speculative realism, an adventurous technoetic ‘what if.’ As compared to more traditional forms of improvisation, the opportunities for risk-taking and aesthetic exploration rise to a new level of uncertainty, as the reactions of the improviser simultaneously draw from and target both visual and aural modalities, such that the intentions toward each fuse together."

The intention of this paper is to discuss space in acousmatic music from a phenomenological perspective. It will argue that space, and our spatial experience, is radically dependent upon intentional acts of consciousness and thus, to some extent, listener dependent. It will go on to demonstrate that intentional acts are not uniform; different sound materials invoke different kinds of intentionality and, for this reason, space in acousmatic music is heterogeneous. The paper will begin by identifying different sorts of intentional acts and consider the role they play in the construction of our spatial experience. Following this, we will introduce Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope and, taking this as a point of departure, provide some much needed terminology to facilitate spatial discourse.

Music from the Hearts of Space, a freeform music program that aired across Northern California on KPFA-FM Pacifica Radio from 1973, set forth an expansive transgeneric vision of contemplative atmospheric “space music” whose properties, in the following decades, would become more popularly codified as either “new age” or “ambient.” Histories of these latter genres typically separate out ambient’s avant-garde lineage and secular functionalism from new age’s therapeutic and spiritual concerns; but an examination of Hearts’s first decade on the air, leading up to its 1983 syndication via National Public Radio’s satellite network, reveals a sonic and cultural milieu that belies this eventual generic split. Through investigation of Hearts’s private archive and interviews with the program’s host Stephen Hill, as well as industry research, cultural-historical study, and style analysis, I situate the genesis of Hearts’s proto-ambient sound within the Bay Area’s new age movement of the 1970s and early 1980s. Informed by the metaphor of the global media environment established in systems theory and popularized by Marshall McLuhan and Stewart Brand, artists and media producers within this grassroots technoculture designed and spread “alternative” personal media for the development of holistic awareness. These media included slow, reverberant, hypnotic recorded music, as curated by Hill and his cohost Anna Turner under the guiding concept of “space music.” This early history and analysis of Hearts’s space music as an atmospheric medium for attuning the listening self to a worldwide media ecology deepens and complicates genealogies that isolate the formation of ambient music from that of new age, revealing a cross-pollination of highbrow and countercultural ideals that led many musicians associated with the new age movement to similar sonic conclusions to those of ambient music architect Brian Eno.

Acousmatic, perfect testing ground for spatial perception. The listening conditions of acousmatic music (no real established sound source) are approaching to those of a blind person who senses space by fine listening acoustic qualities of his physical environment. The "eyes closed" abolish the physical limits of the place, they allow the imagination to deploy its spatial sensations. Species of Spaces: The four main spatial categories. Four categories of space emerge from this particular practice of interpretation and knowledge of the acousmatic repertoire: The " surround space " immerses the listener in a "bath" and is opposed to the " sound source " space which localizes sounds; the " geometry space " in a work structures plans and volumes. These three categories relate mostly to multichannel. The fourth, " Space illusion " , consciously or not, the subject works stereo format, which creates the illusion of depth of field on the screen of two speakers. Ambiophonic Space.

Sound makes places, and as organised sound music contributes to the sonic organisation of place. Some sounds, some music genres, make places more than others. Think of folk or ethnic music. As they emanate from shops, cars, or radios, the sounds of folk and traditional music genres typ- ically demarcate neighbourhoods, cities, even whole countries, by signalling that these places ‘belong’ to a specific cultural space (Stokes 1995). Also life-style subcultures often work in this way, that is, by demarcating places in different urban settings. Venues for youth are often char- acterised by the loud music associated with their subcultures, which in this way reclaim certain urban places as their ’natural’ habitat (Bennet 2000; Connell and Gibson 2002). In sum, we can say that music works as a cultural tool in the construction of locality, in the domestication of space, transforming it into a place that could be associated with, and claimed to belong to, par- ticular groups – be they age groups, ethnic groups, or social classes. Anthropologists, ethnomu- sicologists, geographers and sociologists have documented how music can help define the cultural ownership of space by ethnic, regional, generational, national and even economically based groups (e.g. Mitchell 1996; Leyshon, Matless, Revill 1998; Connell and Gibson 2002; Krims 2007). We suggest that with respect to place, music works like architecture or public art: while build- ings, posters or graffiti create particular semiotic spaces, loading them with special meanings, music can function as a marker of specific meaningful places inside geographical spaces...
...
...

This talk will address the activities developed by the author through a Research and Teaching Scholarship in the research Project “Spatial Synthesis of Sound in the Electro Acoustic Music” (UNQ, 2014-2015, Director Oscar Pablo Di Liscia). The research on the relationship between spatial sound and synthesis-processing methods was addressed through activities focusing on musical analysis, using the analytical approach proposed by Gary Kendall (2010). This approach may be extended to the interpretation and analysis of spatiality in electroacoustic, mixed works and sound installations, allowing a conjoint addressing of the spatial synthesis and transformation of sound materials. The analysis of the spatial quality of the sound is improved as well by the contributions developed by Trevor Wishart (1996), Stéphane Roy (2003), Pablo Di Liscia (2005), Juan Pampin (2009) and Esteban Calcagno (2013).
From the already mentioned theoretical framework, the use of processing techniques to achieve a violation or perturbation of spatial schemata was researched through a set of works with different media combinations and aesthetic biases.

Detailed payment records and notes preserved in the Archivio di Stato di Firenze allow us to reconstruct the relationship of music and space in the Florentine church of Santissima Annunziata. In the late fifteenth century different musical styles and repertories came to define ritually the composite space of the church, one of the main houses belonging to the mendicant order of the Servants of Mary.
This special role of music came into focus in the early 1470s and even more in the 1480s, when subsequent priors increased the musical activities, possibly to negotiate the new spatial features of the church after a consequential remodeling. Music thus helped organize key areas that had undergone architectural transformations, linking each part of the building to the specific rituals performed there through special sounds directed at the likely participants.
The remodeling also involved a shift in the balance of power, with private patrons coming to control the virtual totality of the church. Music helped address this problem as well, by acoustically marking and reclaiming certain spaces as the friars’ dedicated ritual sites, but also creating in its variety a nuanced representation of the community—both ordained and lay—that frequented the building.

The field of interactive music systems (IMSs), beginning in the 1980s, is still relatively young and fast moving. The field of music theory-analysis, during the same period (since 1980), has undergone a major transformation in terms of technological innovations, flexibility, and breadth. The two fields have not really caught up with each other. It will be interesting to see what arises as they do — especially as both fields have become more concerned with the role of the body and embodied cognition. Framed in terms of contrasting epistemological orientations, this essay considers some relevant developments in IMSs, music cognition, and music theory and analysis, leading up to the present.  The most popular approaches to music cognition and to IMS design are rationalist (Ashby 2010), exploiting the ‘correct’ embodiments of music (Godøy 2004, Leman 2007, Paine 2009) based on affordances (Gibson 1977, Kelso 1998). This essay, however, advocates a pragmatist (Ashby 2010) approach inspired by music analysis and exploiting the potential of kinesthetic learning (associative learning). Prompted by a progressive approach to music analysis, theory, perception, and cognition (Dubiel 1999, Mailman 2007), interactive music technology can also be constructive, flexible, and progressive, by exploiting kinesthetic learning from immersion in new and unusual motion-to-sound mappings derived from dynamic formal processes in analysed music. In this way, immersive interactive systems offer an opportunity systematically to learn new associations based on principles theorised in response to analysis. Experience of these systems essentially ‘rewires the brain’, thereby exemplifying what Korsyn (2004) has attributed to Lewin’s (1986, 1987) approach to music perception: the ironist approach, as formulated by Rorty (1989). Thus a pragmatist ironist experimental (PIE) approach is articulated. Rather than committing to any particular ways music is already embodied, this approach acknowledges the flexible nature of embodied musical experience. It forges and uses interactive music technologies continually to redescribe and therefore reform how music is embodied, thereby disembodying to re-embody music, expanding how music is heard, contemplated and experienced.

Le piume variegate e riccamente colorate degli uccelli risplendono anche quando passano inosservate, il loro canto svanisce non udito; il cereus grandiflorus, in fiore per una sola notte, appassisce nelle regioni selvagge delle foreste meridionali senza essere ammirato; e queste foreste, esse stesse una giungla di vegetazione meravigliosa e lussureggiante, che profuma di odori dolci e speziati, marciscono e decadono ugualmente non godute. Ma l'opera d'arte non è così ingenuamente rinchiusa su di sé, è in sostanza una richiesta, un richiamo indirizzato a un animo sensibile, una chiamata per la mente e lo spirito [...]Ogni opera d'arte apre un dialogo con chiunque si confronti con essa. 1 G. W. F. Hegel Con l'apparire dell'uomo parlante e musicante il paesaggio, l'ambiente, la natura, lo spazio circostante si sono modificati. Hanno dovuto cioè accogliere qualcosa di estraneo, qualcosa che prima non esisteva. Da un certo punto di vista il paesaggio sonoro si è arricchito ed è immediatamente iniziato un dialogo tra l'uomo e i suoni da lui stesso prodotti. I fatti, però, non sempre si sono svolti in maniera così idilliaca e costruttiva, giacché da entrambe le parti esiste la possibilità di agire in maniera reciprocamente aggressiva. L'uomo può introdurre suoni/rumori che disturbano l'ambiente sonoro, che lo alterano, nascondendone o coprendone fenomeni di delicata costituzione, fino a farli scomparire del tutto. Viceversa l'ambiente può costituire un disturbo, tanto che l'uomo musicista, per proteggere le sue creazioni ha progettato spazi isolati, chiusi, specifici, previlegiati, con adatte caratteristiche acustiche e "ambientali". Ringrazio per queste immaginifiche e fascinose parole, non solo il suo Autore, ma anche Anthony 1 Julius, che pone questa citazione ad apertura del suo libro Trasgressioni. I colpi proibiti dell'arte (Bruno Mondadori, 2003).

Özet Tarihsel süreçte yapılagelen festivallere göz attı ımızda, mekanın müzik festivallerinin ayrılmaz bile enlerinden oldu u, hem somut (fiziksel) hem de soyut kapsamda kullanılan "mekan"ın fiziksel yapısından festival içeri-ine göre düzenlenmesine varıncaya dek kültürel, ekonomik ve toplumsal uzanımları oldu u anla ılmaktadır. Böylelikle, mekan kavramının festival-ler açısından zamansal ve fiziksel düzeyde birle tirici rolü dikkat çekmek-tedir. Ancak ya amın her alanına giren yeni medya teknolojileri aracılı-ıyla, tüm müzik pratiklerinde oldu u gibi, gelenekselli in ta ıyıcısı atfe-dilen festivallerde de kanıksanmı olguların zamana ve ko ullara uygun ola-rak dönü üme u radı ını görmekteyiz. Bugün deneyimlenen Covid-19 (Yeni Koronavirüs Hastalı ı 2019) küresel salgını, modern ya amın temel alı kanlıklarını içinde bulundu u ça ın getirileriyle, sosyal hayatta özel-likle müzik pratikleri üzerinden de i tirmektedir. Fiziksel mekânın ula ıl-mazlı ı söz konusu iken, belirli festival organizasyonlarının sanal ortamda devam edebilmesi durumu; süreci görece katlanılabilir kılarken, var olan e lence kültürünün de belirli oranda sürdürülebilirli ini sa lamaktadır. Bu sayede, canlı yayınla gerçekle en "Sanal Festivaller" için, organizasyon ya-pısındaki zamansal ve mekânsal birliktelikten söz edilebilir. Süreç içeri-sinde, festival ile özde le mi ve di er zamanlarda alternatifi aranmaksızın kullanılan mekanlara ba lılı ın yok oldu unu aynı zamanda festival prati-inin merkezsizle ti ini, sanal alan aracılı ıyla gerçekle en örneklere baka-rak söyleyebiliriz. Covid-19 Pandemisinin imdiye dek kattı ı deneyimler, sürecin müzik pratiklerine etkisinin pek çok açıdan analizini yapmayı mümkün kılmaktadır. Bu vesileyle; elimizdeki e siz seçenek olan interneti kullanarak, içinde bulunan durumu gözlemleyip, ön kriti ini yapmayı he-defleyen bu çalı ma, netnografi yöntemini temel almaktadır. Bu çalı ma ile hedeflenen; mekân kuramları ı ı ında, süreç içerisindeki "Virtual (Sanal) Festival" örnekleri aracılı ıyla, yeni müzik prati i alı kanlıklarını anlamaya

Bei den Begriffen Polyphonie und Stimmung handelt es sich um Metaphern, die im aktuellen kulturtheoretischen und kulturkritischen Diskursfeld – insbe-sondere für die Beschreibung von Artefakten – hoch im Kurs sind. Damit greift die Theorie auf ein Begriffsarsenal zurück, deren Bildspender musikalischer Provenienz sind. Die produktionsästhetische Performanz verschiedener, dialogi-sierender und sich widersprechender Stimmen im literarischen Text (Erzähler, Figurenreden) erfordert auf der rezeptionsästhetischen Seite ganz im Sinne des kompositorischen terminus technicus der musikalischen Polyphonie »kontra-punktische Lektüren«. Der Stimmungsbegriff wiederum wird im tendenziell brei-ter angelegten Feld der Kulturwissenschaften diskutiert; doch auch hier werden »Stimmungen [ge]lesen« und betreffen somit eine besondere Art von Rezeption. Während das theoretische Werkzeug zur Analyse ›poylphoner Texte‹ durchwegs als Fortführung einer poststrukturalistischen Methodik begriffen wird, im post-kolonialen Kontext Verdrängtes, d. h. eine unterbewusste Latenz, zu erfassen, liefert uns das Stimmungskonzept ein prae-bzw. ein atheoretisches Präsenz-modell einer synästhetischen Rezeption. Beide Konzepte haben durchwegs ihre Berechtigung in der aktuellen Forschung und müssen vertieft werden.

The aim of this work is to carry out a series of reflections on the construction and intervention of the baschet type sound sculpture made in 2017 in Bogotá under the guidance of the Catalan sound artist Josep Cerdá, disciple and heir of all the sculptural work done by the brothers Bernard and Francois Baschet, within the framework of the inauguration of the masters in sound art of the Antonio Nariño University and the 2017 Real Time Festival

This is a study on the use and characterization of settings chosen by nineteenth-century Italian opera composers (and their librettists). It has the aim to reconstruct the visual and acoustic reference imagery that distinguishes authors belonging to the international scene, still protagonists of theatrical seasons (Verdi, Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Puccini) and others still today performed albeit with different luck (Catalani, Giordano, Mascagni, Bottesini). Their traits and their use indicate the living, historical, geographical, social context in which the characters move, offering information and points for reflection about the relationship with reality established by the composers. These are essential elements for a critical reading in staging an opera, for an active and conscious use by the audience, as well as for a better understanding of a culture and its artistic products. The settings and compositional strategies which define them allude to, or refer to situations that are also very destabilizing with respect to which the censorship is completely powerless. Through these choices the composers exercise a critique of space that affects the exploitation of the opera, its contents; they reveal the critical spaces and the spaces in crisis in which are reflected contradictions and conflicts of their era.

Uno studio sull’uso e la caratterizzazione delle ambientazioni scelte dagli operisti italiani ottocenteschi (e dei loro librettisti). Per ricostruire l’immaginario visivo e acustico di riferimento che contraddistingue autori appartenenti alla scena internazionale, tuttora protagonisti dei cartelloni teatrali (Verdi, Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Puccini) e altri ancora oggi eseguiti seppur con diversa fortuna (Catalani, Giordano, Mascagni, Bottesini).I loro tratti e il loro uso indicano il contesto abitativo, storico, geografico, sociale in cui si muovono i personaggi, offrono informazioni e spunti di riflessione circa il rapporto con la realtà instaurato dai compositori. Elementi indispensabili per una lettura critica finalizzata alla messa in scena, sia per una fruizione attiva e consapevole da parte dello spettatore, nonché per una migliore comprensione di una cultura e dei suoi prodotti artistici. Le ambientazioni e le strategie compositive che le definiscono alludono, o rimandano a situazioni anche molto destabilizzanti rispetto alle quali la censura risulta del tutto impotente. Attraverso questi interventi i compositori esercitano una critica dello spazio che incide sulla fruizione dell’opera, sui suoi contenuti; rilevano gli spazi critici e gli spazi in crisi in cui si riflettono contraddizioni e conflitti del loro tempo.