This is a very interesting question.
Ambisonics is cast as a medium that allows the composer, or game designer or whoever, to model a 3D soundfield the experience of which is close to the sonic experiencing of real space.
I say ‘ambisonics’ but it could also be ‘wave field synthesis’ or ‘rendered binaural’ … or any near “reality-equivalent” sound systems. (I use reality-equivalent as defined by Dave Malham in ‘Toward Reality Equivalence in Sound Diffusion” 2001).
In an ambisonic work, is the message the content of the ambisonic work? Or is it ambisonics (i.e. the medium) ?
I’m beginning to think, more and more, that ambisonics is the message, not just the medium. I feel it is a message that has been burbling since Stockhausen attempted to simulate sounds rotating around the audience with his Rotationstisch … a spinning speaker recorded by 4 microphones organised in the same positions as the final speakers. This was an attempt to create a reality of a sounding object spinning around the listener when there was no object there at all.
Here’s a snippet of an interview with Ambrose Field, UK composer who has explored ambisonics:
Austin: That was what was distracting me. I was disconcerted when I first heard ambisonics, because it was too ‘‘real.’’
Field: This is a big issue. ‘‘Too real.’’ I absolutely agree with you. I would hate to take away the act of people’s engaging their imaginations with a sound or a piece or whatever from any form of composition. And you might argue—that’s the basis of what we said earlier about people in the audience—that we have to learn to decode sound diffusion. So we’re left with an ambisonic reality where everything has an accurate physical space, and so on. But that doesn’t mean, as a composer, you stop there. You think of other ways that you can allow the audience to imagine things—how you can transport them to other spaces that might not exist. Now, that’s powerful. If you can make a physical space which, at the same time, encourages a depth of imagination in the listener, then you’re really getting somewhere. There is a problem there with the reality aspect of it. Reality is always a problem, though, isn’t it? (Austin, 2001)
Ambrose goes on to draw a parallel between ambisonics and UK artist Damien Hirst’s piece Away from the Flock (a sheep in a tank of formaldehyde) which he describes as a work of art that makes ‘reality more real’.
That’s the message. That’s ambisonics’ message. Its about reality, experiencing a reality that is out of context, a displaced reality. Its anti-representational. I don’t want to use the term augmented reality. Ambisonics is hyper real, it can cast the listener into new / different / previously inaccessible sound worlds.
Part of the message is the desire to be displaced. And, I think, there is a romanticism in the concept of displacement by sound. There is also a contemporary buzziness in the concept of displacement by *3D* sound.
One doesn’t even have to listen to ambisonics to be inspired by it. The medium is so strong that just the thought of it is sufficient to insight the message. The excitement of the potential of a displaced reality. Imagine what is possible. In a way it is about empowerment… the empowerment of being able to experience something without being there.
In a way, this represents a safe listening position, to be able to hear something but not physically being there … but its not just about a safe listening position… its also about being taken away. Being taken out of ones’s world and lifted into an other. In this sense, ambisonics represents an escape. An escape from the self! from the every day. Its like an empowered escape … empowered through a sonic reality. Its a sound-based transcendence. A sound driven transcendence.
What is the composer to do with this? How is the composer to layer meaning within a medium that already holds a very strong message … that of a desire to be transcended to an other place through a sonic virtual reality? An empowerment born of technology. Its a difficult, but somehow exciting question.
I am exhausted by the inaccessibility of the music I produce.
Just had to get that off my chest. Its a fine line. On one side is inaccessibility, on the other is superficiality (or whimsy). I suspect that in an attempt to steer clear of whimsy, many composers aim straight for inaccessibility, thereby overstepping the non-wimsical but accessible work. I’m tired of inaccessibility. Inaccessibility can sometimes actually be a disguised ‘safeness’. Its easy to produce inaccessible music. I suspect that it is extraordinarily hard to produce accessible *new* music. Hmm .. what I might do in my next composition is stay on this side of the accessibility line. Riské.
Ofcourse, it should not need to be said that the composer jumping over the line and heading straight to ‘inaccessible’ is one engaged in an act of stupidity. Its irrational. The kind of act I am trying to model with the concept of Artificial Stupidity.
