experimenta media arts festival parallel event:presented by Contemporary Music Events

electro-electronics, electricity

Within the boundaries of The Reflective Space, the term 'electroacoustic music' is used to establish a preliminary linguistic launching pad-more than a genre, it defines an experience, a context. Unlike the terms 'electronic music' or 'computer music', it is not used to define the means of production; rather, it establishes the means of diffusion-loudspeakers. The Reflective Space is more about the listening experience and performance than about the adoration of a technology.

The notion of reflection will relate different performance contexts in two ways:

1. Reflection signifying the process of bouncing back, of rebounding, of reflected sound waves producing an image of the sound source; the process of utilising electroacoustic means to reproduce compositions and performances in diverse contexts; a way of pursuing.

2. Reflection as mental process dealing with products of sensation and perception; to go back in thought, meditate or consult with oneself; reflection through performance on the history and contemporary practice of electroacoustic music.

Listening as performance

The written symbol is an impetus to our aural memory of the sound. Although reading silently, our lips and tongue may be making small movements. As if they are 'ghosting' the words we hear in our heads. We read with our ears. We learn of the world as much through the ear as through the eye.

The modern soundscape produces an acoustical diet that is bland. Stop and listen to the general ambience of most work spaces and you will hear the low-frequency hum of air-conditioners; in streets, shops and cafes you will hear the acoustic wallpaper of commercial radio or muzak.

Yet with the advent of domestic digital audio there has been a quiet evolution in expectations of sound. Excepting audiophiles for a moment, home listening prior to the advent of compact discs occurred through the crackling and popping of vinyl or acetate discs or the hiss of cassettes. Now, however, it is the norm to have the clean-some would say overly sanitised-sound of digital audio or the broader band transmission of FM radio as a personal home experience.

While the public soundscape tends toward lo-fi, the diffusion of sound in public, private and virtual space is tending toward hi-fi. Although the latter space has still some way to go, multi-channel immersive experiences in sound are being created for cinemas, concerts and the home. A rave or club is as much about the experience of a weightless 'not-self' that is created by exposure to low frequencies at high amplitudes as it is about dancing.

A concert is an event for focused hearing; for listening. For some amount of time we agree to suspend our own noise making and to allow our time to be inscribed by the musician and/or composer. An essential difference between the temporal and spatial arts is the relationship of time to the perceiver. In spatial art, the unfolding of the work is mostly determined by the viewer. In the temporal arts, it is determined by composer or performer. As the art gallery is primarily a visual event-with occasional reference to the aural-a concert is primarily an aural event that may have no reference to the visual. Associations with physical objects may be made in a personal way; by the metaphors the listener might create with the sounds even though the visual is invisible.

Let's start with the known. A piano or a violin are technological extensions of the human body for making sound; they are sounding models. Though all physical objects can sound, certain materials seem to have a commonality across cultures for use as musical instruments, as do the gestures for sounding these instruments-scraping, hitting, blowing. Prior to the electroacoustic era, music could only be made with sounding models. While instrumental music has an unambiguous relationship between the sound and its source (the instrument), electroacoustic music is defined more by the way a sound is shaped in other dimensions than by pitch, duration, timbre and rhythm.

A sound may not have a direct metaphor to a known or real-world sound. In other words, the listener may not be able to conjure up a realistic source for the sound from memory; instead, the sound triggers a new set of imaginative objects that may have created the sound-a flock of wooden birds, millions of tiny metallic fillings falling across water, a voice emanating from the body of a large bell.

In some instances, a performance of electroacoustic music may have its basis not in a muscular dexterity, but in a mental dexterity. Of being 'in the ear of the composer'. Of travelling an uninterrupted path into a musical imagination. Where an intimate relationship can be formed with rich acoustic environments.

The most extreme case of electroacoustic performance-the tape piece-requires some consideration. The most common reaction of audiences is that nobody is doing anything, or that there is nothing to see. This reminds me of a criticism made of early films, where jump cuts showing a character in one room and then immediately in another room produced a fracture unacceptable to audiences at the time. A space and motion feedback loop was broken in the minds of the viewer. Electroacoustic pieces can have a similar effect. The results of gestures, of presence, of physical and mental effort are available in the work, and are accessed through listening. The piece is a window into the performance in the studio and the acoustic imagination of the listener is being evoked to make some effort of participation in this performance.

An in-between situation occurs when a traditional instrumental performer meets some real-time transformation of the sound, or when the sounds of others emanate from tape: here, the tape and instrument work together. These works are intersections of acoustic potential, the residue of 19th- and 18th Century instrumental technology and its re-invention and interpretation in the 20th Century. Genre has never been a guarantee for a piece that 'works'; this can only be determined on what the piece sets out to do, if anything.

Although we may not want to hear it, music is mostly experienced through loudspeakers. It seems strange that most composers and performers wish to convert their acoustic work into electroacoustic moments-CDs-but don't like loudspeaker music. The economic imperatives of this conversion of time into space override concerns of practice.

On electroacoustic music

The electroacoustic medium allows the use of sounds that have or appear to have no real material existence: sounds unrecognisable in their recorded form, sounds in highly transformed states, or inventively synthesised sounds that weave between materiality and immateriality. For instance, tapping a resonating object-a table, a window, a violin-reveals its 'soundness', and from this one can tell certain qualities of the object; qualities such as its solidness/hollowness, material of construction, tuning, relative size etc.

When one hears a sound without seeing where it came from (except knowing that it came from a loud speaker) then the acoustic imagination comes into play. On hearing a sound, the listener begins to form images and ideas about an object that might produce such a sound; about its size, mass, material form, shape, speed, location.

The electroacoustic studio as musical environment

The studio holds a unique position in contemporary music. Its initial existence as a consequence of technological developments in the recording, production and broadcast of audio developed into a discipline in its own right toward the middle of the 20th Century. The studio provides the potential to explore and organise sound with degrees of rigour, but if it is to be more than a fetish for its users, or a perceived expensive burden to its providers, it requires definition-and that should remain negotiable.

In investigating the nature of the studio as an environment for the creation of music, certain historical models can be invoked e.g. Medieval and Renaissance atelier, multi-user artist environments defined by a shared focus and undertaking duel roles of production and pedagogy. As a catalyst for events, a studio might undertake concerts, production of CDs, sound design for film and theatrical productions, radio programs and sound installations. Each of these activities requires interdependent skills from the creators and performers.

While the idea of the studio re-invents itself now that sophisticated processes are available in software for home computers, its place within the traditional music institution rests uneasily. Surrounded by a group of practices of an historical nature, it seeks to prepare its students for a contemporary practice.

Electroacoustic music studios broadly exist within two main distinctions: those attached to music institutions, and those that exist independently. The role of the former is usually for pedagogy, for the latter, production. Having said that, however, most studios undertake both roles at varying levels. Even more common is the home studio, based around a computer with other dedicated sound producing and processing instruments.

The electroacoustic studios that have been established in Australia since the early 1970s have tended to focus on pedagogy. Due to their placement within the traditional music academies or tertiary sector, courses are offered at the graduate level, and in only a few instances, at the post-graduate level.

While some of the European works to be presented in The Reflective Space were created in medium-to-large independent studios, all of the Australian works were created in Australian Broadcasting Commission, university and private studios. In mounting this project, cooperation between a number of institutions has been necessary. I mention this to bring attention not only to the sites of electroacoustic music practice in Australia, but to note that a society can just as easily survive on cooperation as on competition.

Programming The Reflective Space

The Reflective Space is a series of ten electroacoustic music concerts, broadcasts and installations. It will present works in the primary performance genres of electroacoustic music: the interactive, the combination of acoustic instruments and electro-acoustics, and the diffusion of electroacoustic music on tape and sound installations.

The Reflective Space concerts were developed along two paths: to present the work of Australian and international composers and performers; and to highlight the work of three composers whose status sets another context, namely Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luigi Nono and Iannis Xenakis. It seems that geographical distinctions have little effect in a musical practice so embedded in 20th Century technology.

As an electroacoustic music composer, I approach a composition at one level as a distribution of energy in time. I suspect that this approach has filtered through to programming these concerts. I say 'suspect' because as with a composition, the approach has to unravel itself in time, in performance.

So in putting together a series of concerts, a web of considerations come into play for each piece: its sounding materials, duration, available technology, rehearsal possibilities, available performers, potential responses from the audience (both positive and negative), format of the piece, and cost. Holding all of this together under an initial artistic concept that in part became onditional has ignited further ideas for performances.

An unexpected outcome.

The number of pieces and the duration of concerts has been set to present the works within memorable frameworks. In other words, I hope that after the performances, clear recollections are possible, and that the audience is not left with a sense of sonic overload.
The speaker orchestra