Sound Objects and Spatial Morphologies

Abstract

One of Pierre Schaeffer’s achievements in his musical research was his proposal of the sound object as a basic unit of musical experience and his insistence on listening as a main focus of research. Out of this research grew a radical new music theory of sound-based composition. This article will draw on this extensive research to explore the spaces where this music is heard and present the claim that the space in which music is experienced is as much a part of the music as the timbral material itself. The key question here is the changes made to timbral material through acousmatic spatial listening and the subjective analysis affordance of the listeners’ placement and perspective. These consequences are studied from a phenomenological and psychoacoustic perspective and it is suggested that Schaeffer’s research on timbral and musical concepts can be extended to include spatial features.

Reframing Sound Shapes in Spectromorphological Composition: Notating perspectival space through spherical, Euclidean and Cartesian-coordinate systems

“…Today, recent technological advancements enable the measurement and assessment of the sinner properties of the spatial sound shape in a similar manner to that of frequential spectrograms. The application of vector-based amplitude panning (VBAP), multiple-direction amplitude panning and high-order Ambisonics have allowed composers to delve deeper into the spatialisation of sound, and inherently sound shapes (Cross 2018;Holbrook 2019;Zotter and Frank 2019). Spatial audio and acoustic environments have allowed for the treatment of 'space as an instrument with as much a role as previously dominating harmonic constructs' in computer music composition (Cross 2018).…”

“…The visual relationship between spectral and spatial notation is a fundamental component of spectromorphology. Theoretically they are fused (Smalley 1986(Smalley , 1996(Smalley , 1997(Smalley , 2014Lotis 2003Lotis , 2011Holbrook 2019), but visually they are often treated separately. While spectral properties of the sound shape are representative of modern notational influence (Blackburn 2009), space is often notated using less linear techniques (Dunkelman 1995, cited in Couprie 2011Harley 1996Harley , 1997Berquin 2011;Kim-Boyle 2019), or in a way that strays from the propriety of Smalley's visual sound shape (Boulez in Planel & Merlier 2011;Justel 2011;Anderson 2015).…”