NEXT STEPS
Listening into the Lattice occupies a strange space. An audience that is invited to the heightened awareness of context will recognise that this work is not site-specific but largely the opposite. The work is installed, bringing a spatialised molecular sound sculpture into the room where it is presented.
Listening Into the Lattice projects forms, shapes, and trajectories of sound processes project into a room. These become, though the participation of listening subjects, part of the ‘form’ of the work. Considered environmentally, recognition of spatial trajectories are expected to require less musical experience or training than pitch trajectories as they are everywhere in our environments whereas us of musical pitch is more culturally specific and rarified. Despite this, most electronic music composition treats spatial sound movement as a parameter. It is exceedingly and unfortunately rare than an environmental perspective is adopted towards music, in which, as I have phrased it elsewhere, the soundscape is constituted from multiple systems of events, appearing and disappearing, and evolving at their own rates, apprehended as a textural field. Outside of the very refined and considered spatial thinking of composers like Luc Ferrari, who, in Presque Rien No.1 proposes to “install the soundscape as an already completed musical score” (Xavier, 2023), or Beatriz Ferreyra (Ferreyra, 2023) whose spatial gestures locate sounds within a shared environmental space with the audience, spatial presence is generally treated as simply one of many characteristics to be composed, even subordinated to some other compositional parameter, like pitch. This is particularly the case in the rare examples of spatialised sound in popular and dance music, where the spatialisation generally ornaments rhythmic or melodic structures, or in cinema where it is used to enhance believability for sound effects. By contrast, Listening into the Lattice places spatial form and behaviour as primary, as interacting with the context of the room rather than taking it for granted, and this must be taken further and rendered explicit in future iterations of this work.
If the sounding space is one side of this relationship, the other side is the listener who brings their own context to the situation: their listener-position (Clark,2005, Vickers et al.,2017). As applied to this project, listener-position is a potential field of ways in which the work might unfold phenomenologically for listeners. IKO sound projection, in contrast to stereo and multichannel arrays, and particularly dome arrays, does not create a ‘sweet spot’. This means that there is no privileged listening position in the sound space (Sharma et al., 2014). Furthermore, a particularly odd aspect of how the IKO spatialises the ambisonic sound results in a phenomenon in which the sound does not stand apart from listeners, but instead creates a listening space with the listener inside of it, in keeping with the conceptual intent of our project.
Although Listening into the Lattice has so far only been presented as a concert piece, the planned installation setting of the piece will prove more appropriate to these core concerns and represents the next material step for this work. Furthermore, an environmental installation would allow us to engage this notion of the listener position more fully as time, rather than just space. In contrast to a performance, in which the time scales of the event and the amount of time allotted for experience of the work are generally framed by organisers and normative durations, in environmental works participating visitors establish their own time-frames. The operative expectations in each setting also contrast one another. At a concert, it is generally expected that one arrive at the beginning, sit down, face forward, remain until the end when the sound stops, applaud (to generate a white noise partition between each act) and then go to the bar. In an installation, on the other hand, the audience finds listening positions on their own, perhaps conducting performative investigations of the space and the sound, adopting different listening positions, and leaving when they wish, perhaps returning later. Phenomenologically, installation environments offer the audience opportunity to compose their own focus in a way that is less possible in concert presentation where the material is more ‘given’ by the performer.
Although an installed environmental version of the piece is an immediate development, there are other obvious paths to explore and I would be remiss not to mention these. One new development is the testing of other datasets, particularly data that Dr. Bertini is developing in her present archaeological research. Visualisation based on the glass specimens themselves, microscopic images rendered large or 3d modelled imagings of the molecular structure or specimen source could be animated in space, and if we were able to access a three-dimensional projection environment for this, it would be of great benefit for the project. Although there is a tension for attentive listening whenever strongly visual material is presented, this could provide a means of access for visitors who are not primarily from a contemporary art or experimental music background, encouraging them to join the piece for a while as they ease into the listening modes congenial to the work.
Another interesting possibility is to explore the spaces created by this work though a blending of virtuality and physicality. For example, a sound walk using data to create molecular binaural sound models delivered through augmented reality or a web browser could be strolled through indoors or out. We could thus stroll through molecular data, and potentially other data surrounding us with the detached aesthetic freedom of a flaneur (Baudelaire, 2010). What observations or insights would be gained if the disinterested psycho-geographical present could idly penetrate a sound environment developed through data derived from molecular fragments of the ancient past? We leave the door open.