This paper introduces the Ambisonic Spatial Canvas, a practice-as-research (PaR) framework for composing spatial music directly within Higher-Order Ambisonics (HOA). Developed through an iterative programme of creative practice, critical listening and reflection, the Canvas integrates conceptual, analytical and technical approaches to the organisation of Ambisonic space.

It models a set of interrelated spatial layers, including Immediate Space, External Space and Nested Spatial Environments, and provides methods for constructing spatial form through sketching, listening and refinement.

The Canvas establishes a vocabulary for spatial texture, spatial motion trajectories and spatial gestural writing, extending existing discourses in acousmatic and electroacoustic spatial composition. By treating Ambisonic space as an active compositional material rather than a site for postproduction enhancement, the framework responds directly to contemporary discussions of making spatial audio. It contributes a reproducible, practice led method for creating coherent, expressive spatial works in HOA and offers tools for researchers and practitioners working across Ambisonic composition and spatial sound art.

In this paper, we the present the hardware and software implementation of a cost-effective wireless distributed multichannel audio system intended for immersive sound installations or performances. The system consists of a multi-device network, with each independent unit comprising a Raspberry Pi single-board computer equipped with a stereo loudspeaker and powered by a battery. The distributed architecture is managed by a central controlling computer that sends control messages via Wi-Fi to the devices that generate audio signals. Through the examination of a real-world case study involving an outdoor dance performance with spatialised sound, we address some of the design choices that were made during the development of the system. We compare our framework with other similar approaches previously reported in the literature, in terms of flexibility, maintainability, learnability, etc. In particular, we focus on the challenges related to the creative production workflow when working with a distributed audio system.

The proposed live-electronics duet, in HoA, stages a structured improvisation in which two distinct conceptions of aural spatiality are set into a productive dialogue. One performer works with multichannel recordings as repositories of found aural space—topologies captured, re-contextualised through real-time intervention—while the other constructs an embodied, choreography-inspired “dance” of point sources, articulating space through gesture-driven trajectories, displacements, and constellation. The performance unfolds as an evolving negotiation between two distinct approaches: the qualities of captured spaces, and how these imbue resulting sound materials on the one hand, and the kinetic, event-based spatial inscription of sound objects on the other. Together they generate a dynamic, co-authored spatial dramaturgy in which contrasting methods of producing, perceiving, and inhabiting sonic space reveal unexpected correspondences, tensions, and hybrid forms.

“Ich schweige, daß ich dich höre” is an acousmatic work inspired by Gottfried Benn’s poem “Meer und Wandersagen”, which frames silence as the condition for truly hearing the Other. This idea is explored through a spatial dramaturgy where sound objects, ranging from breath-like textures and AI-generated vocal fragments to granular noise and field recordings, are dynamically distributed across three-dimensional space. The composition was developed iteratively using multiple spatial formats (stereo, binaural, quadraphonic, octophonic and 5.1) and finalized in first-order Ambisonics to preserve spatial coherence across playback systems. Spatialization acts as both structural and expressive engine: chaotic, diffuse clouds of sound alternate with tightly focused trajectories, carving out moments of silence not as emptiness but as resonant voids. The listener is enveloped in a constantly shifting auditory field that mirrors the poem’s vision of space as a unifying continuum holding multiple realities. While the piece remains perceptually legible in reduced setups, its full spatial narrative unfolds in immersive 360° environments, where movement, density, and absence become inseparable from meaning.

The french horn parts have been conceived and played by Noemi Ciafro.

This electroacoustic composition explores the idea of "detritus" as fragments and residues left behind by sound. Drawing from the Latin root dētrītus, meaning "worn away," the work highlights the quiet tension between absence and presence. Using spatial audio, the piece integrates subtle sonic remnants captured from previous performances, each fragment evoking memory and decay. The composition is restless. It is constantly shifting form, pushing sounds into new configurations before they can stabilize. This ongoing churn shapes an immersive space that exposes how listening and memory are continually renegotiated.

In this composition, I tried to situate the listener not as an external observer, but as someone embedded within the sound itself. Rather than presenting sonic events as discrete, spatially located phenomena within the ambisonic field, the piece constructs an immersive environment in which the listener becomes part of a continuously evolving sonic mechanism. This mechanism shifts from one scene or state to another, carrying the listener along a trajectory of transformation, an unfolding passage through different states of being within the aural space.

Spider web, late fall;

Jeweled strands of frost and silk

Catch the falling leaves.

Architecture éphémère is a fixed-media work that creates an immersive experience in which listeners can lose themselves in the time and space of the music. The title refers to the idea that spatial music can generate an ephemeral, constantly evolving architecture that overlays the physical environment. Drawing on philosopher Gernot Böhme, my practice explores how the diffusion of sound shapes the atmosphere of the spaces we inhabit.

The piece explores tensions between opposing spatial sensations—proximity and distance, intimacy and immensity—and the depth of field of the sonic space. Most of the materials are generated through sound synthesis, which I use to create sounds with different shapes, sizes, and densities. Architecture éphémère unfolds as a journey through distinct atmospheres, shifting from explosive, detailed passages, where trajectories can be pinpointed, to soft, diffuse, hypnotic spaces that verge on disorientation.

The opening section presents a frontal sound mass that slowly advances, suggesting immensity and inexorability, before bursting into aggressive gestures that travel along multiple trajectories, as if caught in an explosion. Wide-range glissandi, projected into a rich ambisonic reverberation, reinforce the sense of motion and tension, immersing the audience in a deep and articulated sound field.

A second phase is inspired by the image of a vast snowy expanse whose boundaries remain invisible. Here, slowly evolving sine waves, often difficult to localise, create an ambiguous, enveloping atmosphere. Moving on circular trajectories at slightly different speeds, they intersect to form chords, clusters, and beating patterns, some in very low registers that engage the body as much as the ear. Occasional sharp editing cuts introduce subtle spatio-temporal breaks, further intensifying the hypnotic effect.

Architecture éphémère was initially composed during the workshop series Composing Fixed-media Multichannel Music on a Hybrid Loudspeaker Array led by Pierre Alexandre Tremblay (2022–2023) at the Multimedia Room (MMR) of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology (CIRMMT) in Montreal, and reworked in 2025.

The version presented at the Spatial Audio Gathering 2026 has a duration of 6'17". A full-length version (11'51") also exists.

Moving Pieces is a palette of sounds and gestures that, to me, feel moving—emotionally or in a literal, physical sense. This work highlights that so-called “unwanted” noises, such as handling a recording device mid-recording or residual electromagnetic hum, can be as impactful as a string passage, a tonal sustained guitar drone, or a whisper. What it means to be moved or touched by these sounds in the context of this piece—how, and whether they are moving at all—is left for the listener to decide.

This paper explores how binaural recording can operate as an ethnographic and creative tool for investigating the spatial, affective, and political dimensions of devotional sound. Drawing on fieldwork conducted between 2022 and 2025 in Egypt between Cairo and the Delta region, the study explores the devotional practice of Dhikr by employing participatory binaural recordings and re-listening interviews to examine how spatial sound mediates spiritual presence and collective experience. The analysis situates these immersive sound practices within broader discussions of spatial audio, sonic phenomenology, and the politics of listening, proposing the notion of sonic in-betweenness to describe how binaural sound articulates relations between human and non-human entities, self and Other. The paper argues that spatial audio technologies enable new modes of listening that are at once ethnographic, affective, and transductive.

In the context of real-time spatial composition for Augmented Musical Instruments (AMIs), gesture plays a crucial role. Metaphorically, gesture can be treated as an energetic and perceptual phenomenon inferred directly from the evolving morphology of sound, without relying on physical motion description. We extend a gesture-based approach grounded in spectromorphology analysis toward the inclusion of spatial properties: spatial attributes are derived from the same spectro-energetic cues that shape instrumental sound structures. Spatial images thus emerge as coherent spatial deployment of sonic gestures within a listening-based feedback loop. This integration enables a real-time ecosystem where gesture, sound, and space continuously modulate one another, opening new possibilities for expressive spatial composition.

This paper considers the compositional advantages of spatial sequencing: the precise, deferred-time specification of the spatiotemporal dimension of a multichannel composition. Spatial sequencing allows composers to develop spatialisation through iterative refinement alongside the music itself, weaving the spatial element tightly into the fabric of the work. This aesthetic of integrated spatialisation is described and presented through the case study of strung (2021), an acousmatic piece spatialised with Space Control, the author’s original software for sequencing and layering complex spatial trajectories. Analysis of this work shows how suitable spatial-sequencing tools enable the creation of spatialisation models that articulate specific relationships between sounds, and how these models can enhance or transform the expressive roles of sounds within a composition. The paper argues that this method offers a coherent and replicable framework for integrating spatialisation into the compositional process with a level of intentionality and precision commensurate with traditional musical parameters.

“Tree Tones (Variation I)” is an electroacoustic multimedia piece that aims to compose a journey through surrealist worlds of natural elements in which spatialized resonating 'raindrops' and noise-filtered 'wind' engage with improvisational bansuri flute and visual projection to explore the subtle beauties in human-nature-technology relationships. In it's employment of sound-manipulation, spatialization and real-time audiovisual mapping, this journey embraces the brilliance of technology as not an adversary, but a medium in which to prioritize humans' coexistence with the vastness of nature.

Studio III - Space and Colour (2021-2024) is an audiovisual composition that belongs to the author’s PhD practice-based research portfolio, in which he investigated the concept of intermedial interference.

In Studio III - Space and Colour, the author tested his idea of intermedial interference by manipulating shared spatial and saturation features between sound and image. In stereophonic acousmatic compositions, sound placement, filtering, and spectral emphasis simulate the visual depth of field. Similarly, visual space is altered through blurring, distortion, split-screens, and shifts in colour saturation.

A direct audiovisual relationship was established by linking monophonic sound with monochromatic imagery, and wide, saturated sounds with blurred, colour-saturated footage. The composition employs a recurring triptych split-screen, pre-conceived as a structural sketch, to experiment with synchronised audiovisual movements and varying degrees of saturation.

The study progresses from non-narrative, representational close-ups of flowers with processed instrumental/organic sounds to landscape shots paired with soundscapes. Throughout, associative mapping between media features—such as a centrally placed, filtered sound moving in sync with a desaturated central visual panel—creates perceptual fractures and a unified, expanded perceptual space. This interference directs attention to the media interaction itself, generating tension, relaxation, and narrative ambiguity through mimetic sonic hints.

A key finding of this study is that stereophonic audio may limit the full perceptual potential of such intermedial work. While binaural mixing improves spatial rendering, multichannel diffusion and cinematic screens are ideally needed to effectively balance and expand the integrated audiovisual experience. The presented version of Studio III - Space and Colour is a 2024 remix in 5.1 format.

States of Water is composed for stereo fixed electronics and video by Zouning Anne Liao. Prologue, the opening movement of this work invites the listener into a immersive and magnified world—one in which the familiar substance of water becomes both material and metaphor. While the piece is rooted in the observable states of water, it approaches them in an abstract and imaginative way: not as literal depictions, but as points of departure from which sound and image can drift, distort, and transform.

Prologue offers water as subject, symbol, and imaginative collaborator—opening a space where the physical and the speculative meet, and where the act of looking deeply becomes its own form of discovery.

Gravitanz (from “gravity” and Tanz, the German word for “dance”) is an audiovisual work exploring perceptual instability through sound and spatial experience. The piece investigates the human body as a frame of reference within curved space- time, translating physical models of gravity and orientation into auditory phenomena. The work’s primary dramaturgical engine is spatialisation. 6th-order Ambisonics generates a 3D sonic field in which particle-like densities and trajectories oscillate between chaotic dispersion and sharply defined spatial gestures. Clouds of grains sometimes drift randomly, at other times articulating precise relationships with flashes of light or performer movements. This dynamic interplay creates a continuous sense of attraction and repulsion, clustering and dissolution, weightlessness and sudden gravitational pulls.

Sound material is derived from samples and multiple synthesis techniques, subtractive, granular, pulsar, Karplus-Strong, and wavefield, to which real-time spatialisation strategies have been applied, generating continuously shifting 3D soundscapes. Some gestures use synthesized plucked sounds, referencing the Hindu myth of Shiva’s birth, and thus the birth of space-time. These gradually morph into voice grains, evoking the Creator’s logos. Audio was produced and processed with Flux:: Spat Revolution and the IEM libraries, employing 6th-order Ambisonics, ideally for dome projection.

Spatialisation is conceived as an immersive, perceptual principle, allowing the listener to inhabit an environment oscillating between coherent geometry and disorientation. The camera, though primarily a visual tool, interacts with the performance to emphasise spatial depth and movement, supporting the sonic dramaturgy rather than dominating it. Visual recordings, ranging from time-lapse to 3D slow motion, follow the performer’s body, creating a correspondence between spatialised sound and visual movement.

This paper presents a novel framework for adaptive multi-channel sound diffusion that dynamically optimizes spatial energy distribution in real-world environments through continuous acoustic feedback analysis. Conventional spatialization methods, such as Ambisonics and Vector Base Amplitude Panning (VBAP), typically employ fixed gain structures and assume ideal listening geometries, resulting in perceptual inconsistencies when applied to variable acoustic conditions. The proposed system introduces an adaptive control mechanism that monitors room response characteristics and autonomously recalibrates diffusion parameters in real time to maintain spatial uniformity and perceptual stability. The architecture comprises a flexible loudspeaker array integrated with distributed calibration microphones that capture short-term energy levels, inter-channel coherence, and phase alignment across the listening area. These measurements are processed by a feedback analysis engine to compute a spatial uniformity index, which serves as the optimization target for a closed-loop adaptive controller. The controller continuously adjusts the gain, delay, and equalization values to minimize spatial energy variance while applying perceptual smoothing to prevent audible modulation. Simulation and laboratory evaluations demonstrate that the adaptive framework improves spatial consistency by approximately 30% compared to static diffusion configurations, without significant increases in computational cost or latency. The results indicate that the proposed method effectively compensates for spatial distortions caused by reflections, audience movement, and venue asymmetry. This contribution offers a scalable and energy-efficient approach to context-aware sound diffusion, enabling responsive spatial performance systems, adaptive installations, and reconfigurable immersive environments where diffusion operates as an autonomous, self-correcting process.

Through an autoethnographic analysis of Ouroboros, a work that uses a sculpture as an interface for controlling digital signal processing and spatialisation, this research aims to enhance the experience of mixed electroacoustic music and spatial perception in live performance contexts. Using Emmerson’s local and field functions as a framework, Ouroboros explores the interaction between the performer-field and the perceptual experiences of the performer and the audience within a three-dimensional sound space through the use of a hybrid sculpture.

The composer will discuss the various uses of audio-spatialisation in works from “Red Bird” to “The Garden of Earthly Delights” : spatial distribution of sound material to differentiate or even define musical objects, to define imagined spaces, or to separate initially bonded materials into separate audio-streams, to apparently move the listener through space, or the space through the listener.

The performance investigates real-time electroacoustic improvisation for two performers using synthesizers and gestural MIDI controllers in conjunction with Spatial Agents, a spatialisation framework developed at IRCAM. Incoming mono and multichannel audio is analysed through spectral descriptors and mapped to an agnostic diffusion engine configured for an Ambisonics-based immersive system, treating timbre and space as interdependent compositional parameters. A proprietary algorithm models and manipulates impulse responses in real time, reconfiguring early reflections according to source position and thereby enhancing spatial realism and extending the optimal listening area. Rather than relying on random trajectories, the setup establishes a spatial feedback loop in which analysis-driven spatialisation and performers’ actions mutually inform one another, yielding a continuously evolving timbral–spatial texture

This work is a declaration of intent. To not realize an atlas of calculated trajectories, but of abandoning ourselves to a journey adrift: an interstellar voyage propelled by astral winds of mathematical perfection. From our position, gravitational inertia governs the flow of celestial bodies. Objects that seem still, perform rotations and revolutions at unfathomable speed, their vast arcs rendered as languid drifts, while the smallest elements blaze through the acoustic field at startling velocity, leaving luminous traces in their wake.

The sonic environment is a dance of sidereal pathways, where musical fragments accompany our passage with pulsating rhythms. The course of these elements produces webs of isometric deception as time collapses and expands across the surface of our sound dome, while we observe from the center of the orb.

Originally composed in High Order Ambisonics, this work was forged collectively, through shared practices, exchanged sounds, and the unpredictable alchemy of collaboration, allowing the music to evolve in ways no single mind could anticipate.

[exterior of MACBA, Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain - 23 January 2006]

I’ve always been drawn to the sound of skateboards, particularly in areas where the sound reflects off nearby buildings. In this piece I wanted to use the sounds moving across a space, as well as their percussive characteristics when various moves are undertaken.

In the skateboarding community the word sketch or sketchy refers to a move that hasn’t worked or has failed in some way. I’d spent a good hour watching and listening to this group of skateboarders using the large open space outside the museum, as well as the handrails and steps, leading up to the entrance. Their overall performance was rather sketchy.

The piece forms part of the Aides… mémoires… project with Jonty Harrison, consisting of short form pieces (3-6’) made from single field recordings. To visit the project, please go to https://bit.ly/aidesmemoires.

[Poole Harbour, Dorset, UK – 21 August 2005]

Based on a recording of a small rock pool in Poole Harbour (the second-largest natural harbour in the world, after Sydney), this piece attempts to place the listener inside the pool, by focusing on the character of the water’s restless motion, and only occasionally allowing in the sounds of the world beyond.

The piece forms part of the Aides… mémoires… project with Pete Stollery, consisting of short form pieces (3-6’) made from single field recordings. To visit the project, please go to https://bit.ly/aidesmemoires.

2025. Computer generated spatial audio and acoustic voice. 7th order ambisonics.

The computer music is based on the enigmatic mathematical object the E8. E8 can in one way be understood as a symmetric structure in 8 dimensional space generated by repeated reflections of 8 primitive elements. In this work a static interference field in 8D is considered, a field consisting of plane waves along the 240 ‘root’ vectors of the structure. Audio is generated as mappings of properties of this field and projected onto 3D. Several spatial reverberation systems are formed from the structure. The ambisonics format is used to render the geometry into audio, and for every sample there are up to 500 points audio in space. Due to computational intensity the work must be generated offline. Mostly a new version of the piece is generated for every performance. The voice is acoustic in space and the performer is free to move between or around the audience as the setup allows and facilitates it. I have practiced this form over many years, it is a state of mind to enable a precognitive sense to synchronize timing. The text for the vocal performance is taken from S. Kierkegaard’s book ‘Gjentagelsen’ / ‘The Repetition’, written under the pseudonym Constantin Constantius. The book lingers over the question whether anything repeats and if anything can be repeated. The fragments are taken towards the end where the writer speaks about a poet he has invented for this book, a poet who writes poetry of his own. Link to text and translation: https://frekvensverden.dk/files/digter.pdf. But the fragments are not easily understood, they are more meant to appear as signs of Kierkegaard’s work in general, in which some of the stories told start with the story of the paradox and that of the personal perspective. The work is realized as one very large external object for Pure Data. This object is handling all audio processes and the encoding to ambisonics. The programmed framework is depending on some initial settings and as such variations will appear in every rendering. In 2025 the piece was performed at NOTAM Oslo, and at the SMC in Graz.

Scuttles in pursuit of darkness. Foul-smelling, skin-shedding. A pest of book collections; page-eating, destructive. Ground up with oil, a remedy for earache. Infused in tea as a cure for tetanus. Delicious when fried in a wok. The body flees danger even when the head is removed.

An Insect that Shuns the Light draws partial inspiration from cultural readings on “no-self”, while scuttling away from this realisation. The work was extracted from a nest of unrelated materials gathered over many years: close-up recordings of everyday objects, environmental traces and studio fragments, alongside outputs from non-linear physical models developed in research contexts. These elements collide across four loosely defined episodes, in which eruptions of activity are disgorged into pockets of stillness and apparent void.

Rather than treating space as backdrop or added production value, the piece treats spatialisation as a driver of meaning. The listener is conveyed through a succession of unstable, often surreal environments. Sometimes, this proceeds with a sense of coherence and orientation, and other times, with bafflement and disorientation. The perceived centre of listening is repeatedly unsettled.

From the corner of its eye, the work perceives the ideas that both “self” and “space” may be better understood as ongoing processes than as fixed entities. Rapid shifts between saturation and near-emptiness, between tightly enclosed and open, distant scenes, are used to suggest a comically frightening instability: a subject who cannot quite locate itself, fleeing illumination yet continually re- exposed. Through these movements, the piece investigates a making and unmaking of place: one of the most potent affordances of immersive audio.

Songs to be Burnt No. 1 is an electroacoustic composition that delves into the dark universe of Isidore Ducasse’s Les Chants de Maldoror. The piece draws its inspiration from the following words, which serve as an introductory warning before entering a sonic realm shaped by the monstrous: "May Heaven grant that the reader, emboldened and momentarily rendered as fierce as what he reads, may find, without losing his way, the steep and savage path through the desolate marshes of these sombre and venom-filled pages; for unless he brings to his reading a rigorous logic and a tension of mind at least equal to his distrust, the deadly exhalations of this book will seep into his soul as water does into sugar. It is not good that everyone should read the pages that follow; only a few will savour this bitter fruit without danger. Therefore, timid soul, before penetrating further into such uncharted wilderness, turn your heels backward rather than forward.”

I even said we should become the sound. If the sound moves upward I also move upward; if it moves downwards, I go down too. If it becomes quieter, so do I. - Karlheinz Stockhausen

This composition is accompanied by my master thesis about spatial motion. In it, I detail the specifics of psychoacoustics and other particularities of human hearing that have to be taken into consideration when composition spatial movements. During the course of the work, it slowly ‘frees’ itself from this didactical style and showcases other variants of spatial motion.

Inflections as sound process to sound quality
Emanating otherness of the
Sound quality to sound process from the reflective

Resulting in an immersive rhizome-like sound world of the omnipresent of the
dream like and the very literal

As different zones are successive, simultaneous, above, below, before, and after, to
neither rise nor sink but only float

A longing as the friction, disputes of the literal and dream-like

And

A persistence of a pulse, heavy, through the literal as a constant movement and the
abstract ingenuous stillness, a sound world of the discursive and the narrative

Chiastic process and quality are undermined as the reflections and inflections recur
in rounded proportions. The immersive and form is only tangible through this
insistence that is perceived as a dream occurring in real-like time

Figuratively
Whale Song suggests, quite literally, uncertainty that is

Stuck between the discursive and the narrative,
The moving streams/waves and the pure tones surrounding within,
Stranding

As Dolby Atmos becomes increasingly prevalent in streaming platforms and cinema systems, new possibilities emerge for integrating immersive audio workflows into electroacoustic composition. This extended abstract presents the MaxBridge, a modular patch developed in Max/MSP as a proof-of-concept demonstrating how composers can translate spatialised works into the Dolby Atmos format while maintaining artistic intent. By bridging Ambisonics and object-based rendering, the approach offers a practical and adaptable workflow for both fixed-media and real-time performance contexts. Rather than a finished product, the MaxBridge functions as a flexible DIY prototype that can inspire electroacoustic composers and sound artists to develop personalised spatial workflows compatible with Dolby-certified environments. A short anonymous video demonstration accompanies this submission, showing the patch in operation.

This paper presents the findings of a Practice-as-Research study (MacLeod & Duerden, 2021), analyzing the application and audience impact of in-headphone spatial sound in a contemporary theatrical production. The research addresses a critical need for empirical data regarding the emotional and cognitive effectiveness of immersive audio techniques in live performance settings, aiming to bridge the gap between technical potential (Wightman & Kistler, 1989) and real-world perception.

The study is centered around a critically-acclaimed production where binaural sound design serves as a core dramaturgical element, redefining the boundaries between stage action and the audience’s individual experience. The creative approach leverages sound recording as an expressive opportunity (Giovannucci, 2015), aligning with broader discussions on theater and technology (Dente, 2002). The compositional methodology employed Binaural Ambisonic spatialisation using a commercial-grade plug-in within a professional Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) environment, documented to demonstrate the fusion of the artistic process with performance demands.

To assess the technique’s effectiveness and the achieved level of auditory realism (Guastavino et al., 2007), a quantitative data collection protocol was implemented using a post-performance questionnaire administered to a significant audience sample. The questionnaire explored key perceptual variables, including the perceived level of perceptual, narrative, and emotional immersion (Stenzel et al., 2021), the contribution of spatialisation to emotional involvement, the influence on the perception of scenic space, and overall narrative clarity.

Detailed analysis of the collected data provides empirical validation of in-headphone spatial sound as a potent expressive tool in theater. The results indicate a significant correlation between the perceived movement of sounds and an intensified sense of presence. This work contributes to the literature on applied spatial audio and real-world use-cases in the arts, providing evidence-based guidelines for composers and sound designers working with innovative sound diffusion systems for the stage.

Inudito is an adaptive sound installation exploring multilayer spatial perception through the coexistence of two simultaneous propagation systems: external multichannel diffusion and internal bone conduction. The project investigates how spatialization can extend beyond air propagation, engaging the listener’s body as an acoustic and perceptual medium. The spatial design combines real and virtual propagation models to create a scalable and reconfigurable environment, adaptable to different architectural conditions. Both layers were spatialized and calibrated to maintain spectral balance and spatial coherence while preventing perceptual masking. Short bone-conducted gestural sounds appear in the diffuse external sonic enviroment, setting up a shifting play between foreground and background. The research in Inudito is therefore to find in the spatialization of sound the possibility of uniting intimate and collective listening, through a participatory act of the public, which with its presence becomes an active part of the installation itself.

Two Studies in Ambisonic Spatial Form presents two contrasting yet connected acousmatic works composed natively in Higher-Order Ambisonics. Rather than relying on conventional melodic or harmonic development, the pair focuses on spatial movement, texture and energetic transformation across the Ambisonic field.

Each work explores a particular spatial and sonic character, contributing to a concise programme intended for full sphere Ambisonic diffusion.

The movements were composed across several years and subsequently curated into a single triptych due to their complementary spatial identities. Together they form an immersive fifteen minute experience centred on spatial gesture, texture and motion. For background on Ambisonics and three dimensional audio practice, see (Gerzon, 1973; Zotter and Frank, 2019).

Machine

Machine explores mechanical rhythmic language, tension and release. Percussive and synthetic elements shift through tight localised regions before expanding into wider spatial fields. Layers of rhythm interlock and separate, creating a sense of energetic build up and movement. The spatial palette moves between close, detailed sounds and broader, enveloping textures, producing a dynamic interplay between focus and spread.

Helisynths

Helisynths focuses on rapid, spiralling movements and shifting textural layers. Granulated synthetic sounds rise and fall across the Ambisonic field, creating patterns of swirling motion. These trajectories contrast with sustained harmonic beds, establishing a dialogue between stable spectral material and erratic spatial motion. The result is a vivid and almost kinetic sound world in which motion and texture are tightly interwoven.

Obuténdeka, in the Kubandwa religion —a widespread cult in Central-East Africa— means initiation rite. As one might naturally imagine when thinking of an initiation rite, music plays a decisive role in the ceremony: the steady rhythms of an enymba, a rattle made from a hollowed-out gourd filled with seeds from sacred plants, alternate with the more sporadic sounds of an iron bell, the ekyoma. The extremely precise description of all these musical elements in the Obuténdeka rite, provided by ethnomusicologist Serena Facci, inspired the creation of an electronic interpretation bearing the same name. Obuténdeka is therefore a piece that aims to narrate the various stages of the rite, marked by the recurring presence of a powerful percussive event, symbolizing change and transition.

Seething Field: Imprint is a turbulent interplay of memory and resonance, written for seventh-order ambisonics fixed media. The work unfolds through the filtering, modulation, distortion, and reverberation of a time-stretched recording of Jack Kerouac.

Using ambisonic impulse responses for the Chapel of the Four Chaplains, located in the basement of Temple Performing Arts Center, Seething Field: Imprint harnesses the Chapel’s reverberant and sonic characteristics, a space dedicated to four chaplains who sacrificed their lives on the USS Dorchester—a ship Kerouac once served on but was recalled from before its tragic sinking.

The source material for Seething Field is a brief recording of Kerouac speaking “The Ocean,” time-stretched 512 times from about 1.5 seconds to over 10 minutes. This slow unfolding of speech provides the formal and harmonic structure of the work. The stretched recording was then recursively recorded through the Chapel’s reverb, a process akin to Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room, revealing and reinforcing the shared resonant frequencies of Kerouac’s voice and the Chapel dedicated to the Four Chaplains.

The title draws from the closing lines of Kerouac’s The Sea is My Brother, where ‘the sea stretched a seething field which grew darker as it merged with the lowering sky.’ Seething Field mirrors this seascape, embodying the darkness, expansiveness, and tension of turbulent times, past and present.