Moving Sound: A Choreography-Inspired Approach to Spatial Electroacoustic Composition is an artistic research project that explores the perceived movement of sound as a compositional parameter through the lens of dance theory and human movement. The expressive potential has received less attention compared to the technological aspects of spatial electroacoustic music composition, where various types of loudspeaker setups and algorithms are used to position and move sound sources within a three-dimensional listening space. This research investigates how movement concepts from the field of choreography, together with improvised, embodied sound responses by contemporary dancers, can inform, inspire and possibly reshape the approaches to the spatialization process in electroacoustic music composition.

The project is designed as a qualitative case study investigation, in the sense described by Creswell and Poth, in which each composition and movement exploration constitutes a bounded case that is examined through multiple forms of data, including audiovisual documentation and reflective writing. The cases include the translation of Rudolf Laban’s spatial theories into ambisonic spatialization strategies, and embodied movement sessions in which contemporary dancers respond improvisationally to compound sound patterns. Each case is studied for a broader understanding of how choreographic concepts and embodied experiences inform compositional decision-making in spatial electroacoustic music. The outcome of the research is a series of acousmatic compositions.

This paper provides a practical investigation and critical reflection on the challenges that arise when implementing a binaural conversion workflow for multichannel electroacoustic compositions. Using the specific example of the 3D AudioSpace on soundingfuture.com, the various technical and artistic considerations that arise will be discussed when adapting spatial audio works for listening through headphones.

While it does not present new research, it documents the decision- making process and practical solutions as a technical report. Particular attention is given to the artistic implications of these technical decisions, especially in terms of preserving compositional intent when introducing room virtualization and spatial processing.

The results and recommendations presented here are intended to serve as a practical guide for similar implementation projects, while contributing to a broader discussion on standards and practices for binaural conversion of electroacoustic music.

Binaural Brainwave Simulator is a live quadraphonic audiovisual performance for modular synthesiser and generative visuals that explores how spatial sound can entrain attention and produce subtle shifts in perception. Working with slowly evolving tones, pulses, just intonation and noise, the piece treats the four loudspeakers as a circular instrument, where timbre, rhythm and position in space are composed together in real time.

The work is structured around an analogy between binaural beats and bands of brainwave activity. Slightly detuned tones are sent to each ear so that the brain perceives a third, internal rhythm at the difference between them. By shaping these beat frequencies to move from faster, waking gamma-like activity around 30 to 32 Hz down through beta, alpha and theta regions toward the slow, one cycle per second pulses associated with deep delta sleep, the performance traces a gradual descent through different states of consciousness. Spatial audio allows these brainwave bands to be articulated as musical form, so that shifts in apparent arousal or calm are mirrored by changes in the density and rotation of sounds within the quadraphonic field.

The performance is also explicitly audiovisual. Real time visuals, generated from the same control voltages that sculpt the sound, map these rhythmic processes as oscillating lines, fields and flickering constellations, acting as a kind of graphic EEG for the room. Visual illusions, including stroboscopic flicker and ambiguous motion, echo the psychoacoustic phenomena in the music. Through synchresis, the tendency for sound and image to lock together in perception, listeners experience the piece as a single immersive organism rather than separate sonic and visual layers. The modular patch is prepared in advance, but its routing, dynamics and spatial trajectories are improvised in response to the behaviour of the system and the acoustics of the space, treating the quadraphonic array as a site for focused listening where spatial audio is a primary compositional material.

Materia (lat., substance, cause)–what other, than sound, could be the matter of music? Of course much more: rhythmic, harmonic and melodic structures, every kind of music, even rests. Possible, but I wouldn't like to premise that as given, whose novel malleability, owed to the computer, opens so many spaces as hardly anything else in the history of music. Moreover: no imaginations and ideas that detract from the essence.

Gérard Grisey: " ... our model is sound not literature, sound not mathematics, sound not theatre, visual arts, quantum physics, geology, astrology or acupuncture."

Sound as mutual matter, it shall determine everything else: constellation and process, they ought to emerge from it, equitable, because without unfolding in time even the most sounding remains silent.

How do I find what I like?

Not at all, as I like what I find and I'm searching without knowing for what. It appears and queries me wordlessly, the talk develops within the experiment, the algorithms of transformation and organisation. Whatever in the end maybe–only just–can pass or, simpler then, can't pass in the face of that, what already exists and whereby the new scratches along trundling–that is determined by another matter: me–and in turn not; contingent and only seemingly private are memory and decision.

This piece deals with the sensory overload that we can experience sometimes after a long day of traveling, attending multiple concerts, or when playing several media streams simultaneously at home, for example when opening a browser that has multiple tabs open of music videos and they all start playing at once. At the end of the day we process the recollections of those sounds and experiences in our memory and dreams, and they sometimes appear back in our minds strangely distorted and in unexpected combinations, as if warped in time and space. The work uses synthetic sounds as well as processed recordings of acoustic instruments, which are combined and arranged in space in dense masses of sound.

Lein is music that stems from the history of both organ music and electroacoustic music. Although these two fields have followed different paths through history, they share some similarities, not least through experiments that explore and expand both space and time. By listening backwards, certain lines of origin can be transferred from the past to the present, sometimes clear and recognisable, sometimes distorted and fragmented. Microscopic units of rhythm form polyphonic lines as well as alloys of sound, dynamically connecting what was previously unconnected.

Lein is a multichannel fixed-media piece that has been performed at concerts and festivals in Sweden, Germany and at New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival 2025. In June 2025, Lein won two prizes at the international acousmatic composition competition at the Weimarer Frühjahrstage Festival in Germany: Second Prize and the Audience Award.

This piece was composed as part of the Sample Sound and Music Processing Project (Padova Conservatory) for the Wave Field Synthesis System through WFS Collider software. Risonanze addresses one of my recurring poetic themes in that resonances and space are fundamental aspects in the work. What if the resonances, spatial and timbral attributes of the sound object, become independent of this, with trajectories that gradually move away from the source that originated them? Different change rates can produce radically different and parallel objects which, transforming themselves into textures, increase in width and fuse with the space. The presence of the absence” (resonances: what ”presence” leaves behind) or ”absence of the presence” is a metaphor for our inner life. Composition and spatialization were part of the same process during creation, as Space is a determining parameter of the identity of this sound form. The original format, in Wave Field Synthesis, can be exported in multichannel (variable number of speakers) as long as WFSCollider offers the possibility to render into a version with various types of multi-channel systems using but VBAP calculation. .

Émergences is the third and final part of a series of electroacoustic pieces composed as part of doctoral research on operative representations for spatial sound processing. All three are considered prototypes: they are the (composed) crystallization of work in progress, a way of making perceptible various stages of the research, of which their composition was itself one of the driving forces.

In Émergences, Paul Goutmann explores the appearance of three types of spatial morphologies: strata, spatial textures, and spatial envelopes. Its title refers to the notion of emergence in complex systems theory. Spatial morphologies emerge from a set of operations at different temporal and spatial scales, while remaining irreducible to the sum of the original operations. Starting from filtered impulsive sounds, a sustained note, and a short pre-composed sequence of a few seconds, the sonic material is shaped primarily through original spatial processes developed during his doctoral research.

This article details the collaborative process of designing and developing VOLTA, a portable loudspeaker array. This project was a joint effort between the two authors, the local music community, and institutions. The aim was to create a tool for small concerts, installations, and educational activities, primarily to disseminate works in ambisonic format and to provide the necessary facilities for the pedagogy of spatial audio in the Naples area, Southern Italy. The article outlines the prototyping process, citing sources of inspiration and similar projects, and offers future perspectives on the development and use of the setup across various contexts, emphasizing its inclusive nature.

Most spatial audio systems implicitly privilege a single ideal listening position, treating all other seats as perceptually degraded. This project proposes an alternative, subject-oriented paradigm in which spatialisation is designed so that each listener hears a different yet equally valid version of the work. Philosophically, it treats listening as world-making rather than passive reception: sound emerges as a relation among bodies, rooms, and signals, and the goal of spatial design is to support many coexisting, locally coherent renderings rather than one “correct” image.

Technically, the project implements a node-based multichannel diffusion system for irregular loudspeaker topologies. Pairwise connections between 26 speakers, with equal-power interpolation points, generate a lattice of 1001 conceptual nodes, each encoded as a gain vector. A precomputed lookup-table pipeline quantises the venue into millions of voxels, enabling audio-rate mapping from any 3D coordinate to its nearest node. This allows dense, polyphonic routing and combinatorial trajectories without prohibitive computational cost. The proposed contribution to SAG outlines the subject-oriented manifesto behind this approach, situates the node- based system in relation to channel- and object-based spatial audio, and presents case-study works that explore how such a lattice can make “no sweet spot” an aesthetic, technical, and ethical design choice.

The work revolves around magnetic fields—spatial audio recordings of electromagnetic phenomena, captured using a custom-built electromagnetic ambisonic microphone by the author, serve as the primary sonic material. These recordings are further transformed and abstracted through visual computer renderings and generative image processes, all programmed and created by the composer in Max/Jitter.

In this work, electromagnetic fields are not presented as sonifications or visualisation of physical data, but rather as a narrative—evoking the concept of mesmerism and a sense of mystic theatre, where unseen forces animate imagination.

Conceptually and poetically, the work draws inspiration from Franz Anton Mesmer’s (1734– 1815) notion of animal magnetism—a historically and discredited pseudoscience that serves as a symbolic point of departure for artistic exploration. Here, imagination engages with the esoteric: a place where belief and doubt intertwine, and unseen energies open a borderland of mystery.

I’ll Be Your Co-Pilot: Redux is an audio-visual video work that examines human- technology relationships through algorithmic composition and automated visual response systems. Using the web browser as both medium and creative tool, the work employs four audio files: three audio loops that automatically crossfade over 30-second cycles, creating an ever-shifting soundscape without human intervention. The vocal track operates autonomously, fading in and out at random intervals between 10 and 40 seconds, playing for precisely 10 seconds at full volume before retreating. This removes human control over when the voice appears, suggesting technology’s capacity to assert itself unpredictably. The visual system is created using Three.js, a JavaScript 3D graphics library, rendered directly in the web browser. The system comprises two layers: a fractal noise background using custom GLSL shader code that generates procedural fractal noise patterns, and 1,000 wireframe cubes arranged in a 10x10x10 grid. Each cube is rendered as a wireframe using Three.js’s MeshBasicMaterial. Both layers respond to Web Audio API frequency analysis. The API analyses the playing of audio files in real time using an AnalyzerNode with an FFT size of 512, producing frequency data across 256 bins divided into three frequency ranges: low, medium, and high. Each cube is randomly assigned to a frequency band at initialisation, meaning that the system, not the creator, determines which cubes respond to which frequencies. The cubes scale from 0.25 to 10 times their size and shift from dark grey to bright white based on their assigned frequency band’s amplitude, with scale and colour intensity updated every frame. The audio and visuals from the web browser are captured using OBS and recorded to a video file. The audio received further processing in Ableton Live, where frequency bands are separated into different channels and their spatial qualities are manipulated over time, adding another layer of technological mediation to the work’s examination of human agency within computational systems.

This work offers a fresh interpretation and perspective on historical masterpieces, utilizing contemporary technologies and tools. Specifically, it revisits two dances directed by Alice Guy-Blaché: Danse Serpentine (1897) and Danse Excentrique (1902).

One of the core ideas explores the transition between potential energy and dynamic energy, reflecting the movement between tension and release that mirrors lived human experience. Life continuously oscillates between struggle, obstacle, resolution, and the return to challenge — a cycle echoed in both sound and visual motion.

Alice Guy-Blaché (1873–1968) was a pioneering filmmaker, recognized as one of the first creators of narrative cinema and the first woman to direct a film. Despite her foundational role, her contributions were overlooked for decades, a historical erasure that resonates deeply with the themes of this work.

Moved by these two early cinematic pieces, I sought to reinterpret them through contemporary audiovisual composition, paying homage to Guy-Blaché’s visionary work while exploring new artistic possibilities.

Kairos is a live spatial sound performance built from looping delays, slow evolving drones, and field recordings shaped in real time. Each performance responds to the room it is presented in. The work moves between quiet tones, low frequency energy, and narrow bands of detail that travel through the space.

The project draws on practice research exploring spatial sound, repetition, and meditative listening during a Masters in Music and Sound Design at the University of Greenwich. This led to the development of an Ambisonics performance system called EchoSpace, created for live improvisation and composition with spatial sound across different speaker layouts. Using a DIY approach, the system centres on a custom Lemur interface controlling Reaper, which hosts spatial effects and connects with synthesisers, samplers, an Ambisonic microphone, and other instruments. EchoSpace supports real time performance and composition shaped by the space.

Source material includes patches created with hardware and software-based synthesis, sampler- based textures, and feedback or resonances from the room captured with an Ambisonic microphone. The work also incorporates field recordings from quiet outdoor settings including dawn choruses, wind across open ground, and small mechanical movements picked up by contact mics and coil pickups. During the performance these sounds form a slow shifting structure. Tones stretch, bend, and pull apart. Spatial gestures evolve and overlap. Sounds rise, fall, move above the listener, or circle the room at different speeds, creating gentle motion that supports calm listening. The result is a sound field that invites people to slow down and listen with care.

Kairos was premiered at the Bathway Theatre in Greenwich and later presented at the 2025 Sound Image Festival. Compositions using the system were also developed in the University of Greenwich studios, with the IKO speaker, and during a residency at Bidston Observatory Artistic Research Centre in the Wirral.

his performance marks the next step in the development of Kairos. A full sphere setting offers the chance to expand the project, deepen its spatial language, and move into the next phase of the work.

This audio work is rooted in the context of life and its connection with negentropy. Living beings, from the simplest single-celled organisms to complex ecosystems, seem to defy entropy by maintaining and increasing internal order—organizing, structuring, and preserving the system’s processes in a state of low disorder. Theta grows as a sound that takes care of itself: it absorbs energy and transforms it, changes shape, moves toward entropy, yet returns to its own center as the foundational element of its acoustic life. Its path may be direct or indirect, but what characterizes it is the return to life.

Within the silence, defined directional sounds emerge overlapping, sliding, chasing one another, and expanding across different registers, creating formal, tense architectures and outlining imaginary chiaroscuro landscapes. In these spaces, pointillistic elements and sound bands form arches of celestial or infernal cloisters, surrounded by trellises that are at times smooth, at times elaborately ornamented. The parameter of time becomes a parchment on which a spatialization is inscribed, illuminating and activating sound events marked by their own virtual autonomy events that whisper, that pass through us, that depart from us.

Two Sparrows is a brief glance at loss, departure, and opacity. It was borne out of an obsession with quiet sounds and the threshold between sound and silence.

Few sounds bow gracefully into silence; some sputter, some crack, some choke to a stop without warning. Technology, especially, is allergic to silence. We are similar to our machines in this way. Cassette tapes cannot create true silence, and neither can many AI models, or vinyl records, or my old waterlogged iPod earbuds.

In Two Sparrows, a single voice summons a fragile symphony of quiet and accidental sounds: whispered voices, cassette recordings, dregs of AI-generated orchestras, the world outside a closed window. We witness these sounds as they become so quiet they break, in their paths towards oblivion.

After John Murillo’s ‘Upon Reading That Eric Dolphy Transcribed Even the Calls of Certain Species of Birds.’

Playper, as its title suggests, is a play on paper. The majority of the sounds in this piece are very familiar to our everyday lives: they are samples or processed samples related to paper, such as writing, wrinkling, tearing, printer noises, etc. These sounds are panned through a three- dimensional plane, creating surrealistic effects (for instance, you could not write on a sheet of paper three-dimensionally!). This piece is also inspired by the composer’s composition process: a frustrated composer who writes his idea on paper but immediately thinks that the idea is uninteresting, crosses out his drafts and tears the paper.

We grit our teeth in moments of tension, keeping them clenched while we wait for time to pass, for another condition to arrive, for the grip to finally loosen. Denti serrati is a piece born from this state: the desire to go beyond the limits of degree and order, to overcome the boundaries of one's own experience.

What emerges is a metaphysical environment that oscillates between sonic pressure and release. The music does not progress in a linear sense, instead, it opens a space where tension becomes material, sculpted and suspended, inviting the listener to inhabit its slow transformation. The spatialisation amplifies this intention and creates a circular space continually tending upwards. In Denti serrati, ascension is a desire that remains out of reach, unfolding in looping movements of sound that repeatedly attempt to rise. The piece is a &ghtening that becomes an opening and a moment of tension transfigured into a larger, more luminous sound-space.

Slowing down, speeding up, then slowing down again, stretching and loosening the fabric of time and its perception, as if it were an elastic, malleable cloth. Variations in energy become agents of transformation: they draw, erase, and distort other spaces — distant or suddenly near. Abrupt changes in gravity anchor us to the ground, only to lift us up again. How much further can the elastic be stretched before it breaks?

This fixed media composition is inspired by the chaotic energy and fine particulate detail of a dust storm. Dust storms are violent, mesmerizing phenomena—walls of wind-borne earth that reshape both landscape and perception. This composition seeks to capture the duality of their nature: the immense, chaotic energy they unleash and the microscopic precision of the dust itself, suspended in turbulence. On a metaphorical level, the piece explores erosion—not just of land, but of memory, identity, and form. As with a dust storm, boundaries blur. Sound becomes sediment. Structure is worn away until only traces remain. Originally written for the seventh order ambisonics —64 channels, this piece can be mixed down to whichever configuration best fit for the concert hall.

The “X6 – Hexaphonic Spatialized Guitar” project is about an augmented electric guitar designed for 6.1 channel spatialization. With the X6 setup and a special breakout cable, it is possible to manage the sound from a hexaphonic pickup, which separates the guitar signal into six independent channels, one for each string. These signals are sent to a computer, where Max/MSP processes them in real time with filters, loops, sound manipulation, and spatial projection.

The first version of the project had a fixed structure controlled by a sequencer that automated the filters. In the latest version, a flexible multi-channel filter matrix has been added, together with inputs for voice, electronic instruments, and samples. This makes the performance more open and improvisational, allowing for control over time, sound layering, spatial gestures, and vocal or electronic transformations. The idea is to build a self-made hyper-instrument where the performer and the algorithms influence each other, creating electroacoustic music distributed in space and combining different musical practices.

The newest patch, version 20, also uses artificial intelligence. With machine learning tools (FluCoMa), the system can recognize instrumental gestures and automatically change filter settings. With neural synthesis (RAVE), it can modify the sound of each string by acting on the latent spaces of the model, producing deep timbral changes.

The project also includes an interactive audio visual part made with TouchDesigner, where the screen is divided into six sections that represent the six guitar strings. The visuals are generated with AI using prompts inspired by Renaissance painting, but mixed with modern themes such as social distortion, bias, and the perceptual effects of today’s hyper-technological world.

In general, the concept reflects on a kind of “second Renaissance”. This idea suggests that we are living in a new era where imagination is shaped not by traditional art or patronage but by digital technology. This new t´echne opens new creative possibilities, but also brings ethical, cognitive, and epistemological questions that we are only beginning to understand.

Lake Nezahualcóyotl is a reservoir in Chiapas created as part of a hydroelectric power scheme. The dam was completed in 1966, and the area around the original lake flooded. Just a year earlier a similar flooding drowned the village of Capel Celyn in Wales, controversially displacing its Welsh-speaking residents. At both lakes, droughts cause the periodic re-emergence of the drowned buildings, with increasing regularity: a 16th century church at Lake Nezahualcóyotl and the ruins of the village of Capel Celyn.

These appearances re-awaken painful memories of lost worlds and past injustices; but they are also a very present reminder of the crisis of climate change, in Mexico, Wales and across the globe.

Materials in the Two Lakes have been shaped using water level and flow data from both lakes, provided by the Copernicus Climate Change Service (EU) and the National River Flow Archive (UK). I am indebted to Dr Iestyn Woolway for his assistance in accessing and understanding the data.

The piece explores the relationship between human and machine in artistic creation, focusing on human decision-making in performance, synthesis, and media isomorphism. It suggests that technology and artistic performance are best unified through perceptual understanding, balancing automated processes with human interaction.

Glass and tile shards were chosen as sound objects. Though not naturally resonant, these materials enabled exploration through vibration and human manipulation, bridging physical objects with digital sound. Performance and improvisation were crucial in shaping the piece's structure, with tonality and gesture determined by performer’s choices and technique. Controlled sound events combine live performance with partial automation.

Two key algorithms shaped the digital soundscape: Chebyshev's Polynomials for filter design, optimizing frequency selectivity and ripple control, and the Sieve of Eratosthenes for prime sample intervals, enhancing sound fidelity. Spatial reference was essential for distinguishing individual synthesis streams.

The glass shard motif served as the primary interaction model, with tile fragments helping define sound event morphology. The concept of linearity guided the overall form, using sampling as an isomorphic representation. This framework allows various media to be projected through vector matrices across different spectra while preserving their essential characteristics and artistic integrity.

Reverie is an 8-channel acousmatic composition that leads the listener through an immersive fantasy centered around deconstructed music boxes. The work comprises eight sections that alternate between explorations of the music boxes’ gears and chimes. In the work, the music boxes’ sounds are pulled apart, exaggerated, expanded, and combined with other sounds whose timbres and textures are reminiscent of the original. As the piece unfolds, the timbres increase in spectral and textural density, and the associ ations become more and more fantastical. Gears are transformed into zippers, coins, chainsaws, motorcycles, and fireworks, and the chimes morph into rainstorms, all sizes of bells, pianos, and more.

"Ööõhk" in Estonian, or "Night Air" in English, was created at the BEAMS residency in Viljandi, Estonia in June 2024. The piece was inspired by the neighbourhood where I was staying. Every night a nightingale would start singing around 12:30 am, as I drifted off to sleep. Around 3:30 am, the birds' dawn chorus would start, often waking me. This piece explores this dreamtime between, as I'm drifting away to sleep with the night sounds.

This piece was created with 2nd order ambisonic microphone field recordings of my neighbourhood birds. I also use vintage analogue synths and sampled pianos processed and manipulated in my custom live performance software, the Pinchbecker. The accompanying video is also generated from video clips I collected in the same area, capturing the Estonian "white night" and reflecting these hours of dreamtime. The video is processed and manipulated live using my custom software, the Videomasher, with gestural control and reactive interaction with the sound.

Contemporary music has faced limitations in its parameters and a perceived rigidity, often leading to solutions involving external additions like visuals or interactivity. This project proposes an alternative: subtraction. By projecting concepts from other media into music itself, we can explore new artistic territories purely through sound, without visual or interactive crutches. Imagine music directly informed by information and computation.

While Masahiro Miwa’s “Reverse Simulation Music” hinted at this, my approach aims for broader application. I’ve created a Unity application treating diverse sound sources (traditional instruments, cello) as objects governed by algorithms like turbulence, gravity, simulated circuits, and generative architecture. Listeners experience these sounds moving through a 3D space according to these rules, yielding novel auditory landscapes. This is “subtraction of media” or “projection into music” – no visuals needed.

However, fixed sources risk “Sourceism,” where a single musical series predetermines processes. Improvisation offers a solution: real-time cello input via a remote microphone feeds the algorithmic system, making output the process. This disrupts musical destiny. The key result is the observable circulation within the algorithm, a departure from Sourceism. This piece embodies both the practice and outcome of this subtractive philosophy.

Like Telephones explores the tension between generative processes and composed intention, unfolding as a series of sonic environments in which sounds appear simultaneously intimate and impossibly enlarged. The piece takes its title from an image of communication stretched across distance - signals that feel familiar yet distorted, like voices travelling through systems whose scale and logic exceed the human. Within this framework, the piece plays with the idea of “smaller sounds in larger spaces,” and conversely, what it means for a sound to exceed the size of the virtual room that contains it, hinting at impossible acoustic bodies.

Rather than using spatialisation to point toward discrete events in a surround field, the piece embraces immersive ambisonics as a vehicle for a more bodily, synthetic form of emotion. The spatial motion here evokes sensations closer to vertigo or motion-sickness than traditional dramatic gesture, forming what might be considered pseudo-emotional responses generated through movement rather than harmony or melody.

Much of the sonic material is derived from Karplus–Strong architectures, yielding bell- like timbres that hover between the natural and synthetic. This contributes to an ongoing concern in my work with the “uncanny valley” in sound: the moment where a tone feels almost recognisable yet subtly “wrong,” generating tension between perception and expectation.

Like Telephones was built as a through-composed work developed over many months. Rather than imposing a macro-formal plan, I approached each section by asking how much “busyness” or density the sound field could sustain. This mirrors long-form improvisation but also raises questions about how generative structures accumulate meaning over time.

This presentation explores compositional approaches to space and spatialisation in three multichannel acousmatic works. It begins with Pellere (2011–12), an 8-channel piece using open-source software, focusing on stereo sound deployment alongside the development of 8-channel spatial sound identities. The discussion then shifts to Traces of Play (2016–17), a 4-channel work composed with a 5.1 system, examining how adopting reduced fixed-format speaker configurations impacts on spatial creativity. Finally, Reflecting Cau Cau and Parque Urbano del Bosque (2021) uses ambisonic techniques, highlighting unique spatial manipulations and workflow changes. The presentation concludes by discussing hybrid approaches currently under development that integrate ambisonic and channel-based techniques into compositional workflows.

Chumbi is a collection of unit generators (UGens) encapsulated as a package of ‘Chugins’ for the ChucK programming language Wang et al. (2015) that provides higher-order ambisonic (HOA) encoding, decoding and calculation of spherical harmonics. Historically, ambisonic processing could be performed within ChucK by utilizing computationally inefficient arrays of UGens acting as gain values for incoming signals. This led to excessive control structures and higher level processing having to handle the calculation of spherical harmonics. Chumbi addresses this by providing a spherical harmonic algorithm for ChucK’s builtin math library and a set of UGens which accomplish the encoding and decoding of ambisonics via low level, high performing C++ code. At the same time, Chumbi was designed with the goal of making HOA accessible to computer musicians by abstracting the complex signal processing and mathematics required for ambisonics, so that users can create their own processing schemes. With that goal in mind, Chumbi is easily deconstructed to the basic ambisonic signal processors which make up a system, enabling user created weighting systems to accomplish beamforming, highly personalized decoding schemes for site specific optimization, and pairings with ChucK’s AI layer to create gesture driven audio spatialization.

This work presents the design of a 36-loudspeaker 3D ambisonics system without a southern hemisphere within fixed architectural constraints. The study evaluates candidate configurations using condition numbers, vector- energy (VE) and velocity-vector (VV) metrics, and discusses hardware choices such as DAC selection and clock distribution, with validation from post-installation measurements.

Current software for network spatial audio is limited by capacity or interoperability. Here we have developed a new spatial audio mixing and distribution engine, optimised for efficient processing of many audio inputs and outputs from physically distributed sources. This allows for large scale social interaction and performances in shared virtual audio spaces. The server supports multiple different audio I/O clients, enabling different modes of AR, VR and MR presentation.

The Electropoem series is a collection of multichannel compositions that explore the connections between sound, space, and poetic expression. Each piece focuses on the spatial placement and movement of sound to create an engaging listening experience where the balance between sound and silence encourages attentive listening.

The multichannel format allows sounds and textures to move dynamically within a defined space. This approach helps create clear and precise auditory environments, making it easier for listeners to focus on the details of the music.

Electropoem No. 12 is based on sounds recorded by NASA on Mars. This includes 16 minutes of raw, unfiltered sounds captured by the Perseverance rover as it traveled through Jezero Crater. The recordings feature noise generated by the interaction between the rover’s wheels, suspension, and the Martian surface, as well as a high-pitched scratching noise. Notably, the microphone used for these recordings was originally designed for entry, descent, and landing operations and had limited testing for surface recordings before the rover’s launch.

Mars’s atmosphere affects how sound behaves. Because it is cold and thin, sound travels at about 540 mph (240 m/s), which is slower than the 760 mph (340 m/s) on Earth. The atmosphere, mostly made up of carbon dioxide.

The work also uses the ED2-07 tuning system, which divides an octave into seven equal parts. The scale is as follows:

171.42857, 342.85714, 514.28571, 685.71429, 857.14286, 1028.57143, 2/1

This tuning system, combined with the unique Martian soundscapes, adds variety to the series and introduces new musical possibilities. By combining these elements, Electropoem No. 12 highlights the potential for new approaches to music using unfamiliar sound sources and tuning systems.

Machinarium unfolds as a journey through an imaginary city of machines, where mechanisms seem to think and structures begin to breathe. Layers of image and sound interlock like gears, evoking a world in which the boundary between living organism and industrial artifact becomes uncertain.

Hollow Point is a fixed media composition exploring layered resynthesis techniques. Field recordings are split into individual layers using automated processes that aim to separate the original files into musically relevant parts. Each layer sounds “thin” or “hollow” due to the imprecise nature of these algorithms, with artifacts often remaining. However, when all layers are combined, these imperfections cancel out, recreating the original audio. By keeping the layers separated, they can be individually processed, resulting in new textures and spatial effects that are difficult to achieve with the source file alone. Exaggerating these artifacts can generate new musical motifs and materials. These layers also provide fresh input for musical agent software to rearrange, creating multichannel compositions that differ significantly from those based solely on the original recordings. The piece enhances micro gestures and inner structures, making them more detectable for machine listening systems.

Doorframes covered in masking tape is a piece that employs percussions, concatenative synthesis and voice fragments to explore an empty space. Warehousing - corporations buying entire floors (entire buildings) just lo leave them empty and raise the prices. At the center of our cities, this creates a vacuum - a space barely seen, barely existing. The piece is not a naturalistic description - it’s a vaguely distorted mirror of the subjective feelings this kind of liminal space evokes.

strung focuses on textural gestalts derived from deconstructed instrumental tim- bres, with a particular emphasis on sounds from inside the piano. These sounds coalesce with additional, abstract sonorities derived from strings and winds, giving rise to sonic morphologies both familiar and foreign. Taking inspiration from the dynamic profile of the piano, the formal development of the work is driven by several strong attacks, the residual energy of which manifests in ever-shifting textures. Space is a primary means of articulating the chang ing nature of this energy, with the shape, size, and speed of spatial movement serving to communicate its dissipation, resurgence, or stasis. strung features pianist Kataryna Kopelevich.