Immersive, Interactive, Real and Imagined Sonic Environments: Encountering the Aural Muse in Imagined, Implied Spaces

Abstract

Perhaps the most significant contributions that computer and digital technologies have brought to our experience of music and sound art are to be found in the transformative effect that it has had upon auditory space and performative practice. Of course, there is nothing new in the importance of complex listening spaces for the muse to unfold, our history provides many examples - from Stonehenge in England, to St. Mark's in Venice Italy. However, now, the listener can experience and traverse an endlessly complex transformation in real-time of any number of virtual listening spaces. This has had the consequence of increased focus and importance in recent years being placed upon sonic spatial and immersive diffusion considerations in the compositional act. Bringing further dimensionality - if you will - to the idea spoken so eloquently by Luigi Nono during the period of his work at the Experimentalstudio in the 1980s of a 'dramaturgy of sound.' © Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering 2014.