Sound in Space 2000 Symposium.(Critical Essay)

Center for Research in Electronic Art Technology, University of California,

Santa Barbara, USA, 18-19 March 2000

Space. The coming of the new millenium must have brought with it some synchronous concerns, for the theme of space in music and audio has been the topic, in one form or another, of various gatherings. The annual meeting of the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States (SEAMUS) in March focused on spatial diffusion of electroacoustic music. The following weekend, a number of musicians and researchers met in Santa Barbara to explore "Sound in Space." The Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) also chose to focus on "space in music" as a special topic of its annual Summer Forum, held in June in Paris. And, of course, at the various Audio Engineering Society gatherings and related events, surround sound has become a hot issue, with new hardware and software being released at an increasingly urgent pace.

The Sound in Space 2000 Symposium was conceived by Curtis Roads and organized through the auspices of the Center for Research in Electronic Art Technology (CREATE) of the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) with the help of JoAnn Kuchera-Morin, Stephen Travis Pope, and a number of graduate assistants. It took place over two days on the idyllic, lagoon-side UCSB campus. There were no formal concerts scheduled, but spatialized sound was very much in evidence, with an eight-channel "Creatophone" sound system installed in the symposium hall for the weekend. There were numerous demonstrations, entailing an at times overwhelmingly complex configuration of computers, instruments, sound cards, projectors, mixers, and playback equipment. To the organizers' credit, everything ended up functioning as it should, albeit with occasional delays (though no one seemed to mind the additional brief opportunities to soak up some California sunshine).

When presenting research on sound in space, the sound system is obviously of crucial importance. The Creatophone is a spatial sound projection system of flexible configuration. For this symposium, the various inputs (ADAT, DAT, CD, computer with 8-channel output) were fed into a 16-bus Soundcraft mixer and then out through four Threshold stereo power amplifiers via Horizon, AudioQuest, and Tara interconnects and MIT and AudioQuest speaker cables to eight B&W Matrix 801 loudspeakers. The room, a rectangular lecture/recital hall wider from side to side, has tiered seating curved in a semi-circle around the small stage area. The loudspeakers were placed in a standard octagonal configuration with two in front, two in rear, and two each on either side. The best listening was found in the center, as one would expect, but many spatialized effects could be heard quite effectively from other locations as well. The superior clarity and power of the Creatophone sound system certainly enhanced the listening experience, regardless of seating.

The presentations at the symposium (abstracts can be found at www.create.ucsb.edu/news/ space.html) can be grouped into four categories: historical/analytical, conceptual/compositional, technical, and demonstrations. There was a degree of category overlap in the work presented. So, rather than grouping the papers into "sessions," the schedule was designed so that a theoretical discussion would be followed by a demonstration, which would in turn be followed by engineering research, and so on. It was, altogether, a lively symposium, with discussions spilling out into the gardens and terraces during breaks.

Curtis Roads (CREATE) opened the symposium with an historical review of sound spatialization for music, covering both physical and virtual systems. His presentation set the context for the weekend, along with the complementary paper by Stephen Travis Pope (CREATE), "The State of the Art in Sound Spatialization," which introduced a number of concepts and issues of the field. Frank Ekeberg (City University, London) laid out a framework for describing and understanding space as a structural element in music. His model, based in part on the spectromorphological approach to analysis developed by Denis Smalley (also at City University), defines sound objects in terms of "intrinsic," "extrinsic," and "spectral" space. Maria Anna Harley (University of Southern California) gave a lively discussion on the "signification of spatial sound imagery," taking the circle/sphere and net/web as paradigms of spatial design in contemporary music. She drew on a number of interesting, and occasionally amusing, examples from both electroacoustic and acoustic music. Frank Pecquet (Universite de Paris I) argued for an aesthetic conception of space that is inherent to music, based on the simple, but often overlooked, observation that sound is naturally propagated through air (or other medium), and thus through space. He also played examples from his own music that tries to combine the spatio-timbral properties of instruments with amplification and electroacoustic sonorities. Finally, David Malham (University of York) balanced Mr. Roads' historical opening remarks with a discussion titled "Future Possibilities for the Spatialization of Sound." In particular, he talked about the Hyper-Dense Transducer Array as a potentially "ultimate" sound spatialization system (see Figure 1).