Finally, nearing the submission date for this spatialisation project, I carried out a final mix of my project, fully incorporating elements of both iteration of ‘Building’, as I have decided to call it. A large portion of the session was spent troubleshooting routing issues. I found the tactile hardware routing from the eight-channel interface to the speakers intuitive, despite the rat’s nest overwhelm of cabling. Inside Logic, however I was struggling with every channel playing from both it’s designated quadrant, whether left, right or rear, and doubling in the centre stereo pair. After some time diagnosing, I found it was quite clearly a bus that was causing the problem. To resolve this, I bounced each stem bypassing the bus, with the effects active on each respective track, before placing them back into a new project and re-routing them.
Alternately sitting and standing in the centre of the ring, made me feel the intangibility and fragility of the sweet spot. As I moved my head, even slightly, an acoustic effect I can only really articulate as slurring occurred. Over the hours spent mixing the work, it became somewhat dizzying. The sweet spot, as the octophonic ring’s current setup demands, is actually very small. It taught me a great deal about the dynamics of my piece, and about the potential applications of ambisonic recording.
Recording in tight, indoor environments in ambisonics is where spatiality is perhaps the least immediately evident. Closing my eyes for a prolonged time, I could trick my brain somewhat into believing it was real, that those voices were in the room with me. I think is some ways, that effect is more true to life. We, or perhaps I, don’t experience life as sensory IMAX Dolby sound, constantly immersed and awed by circling sonic wonder. The truer, closer to the ground average is a listening numbness in my experience. Perhaps this opportunity to create spatial work is the time to let fly and make sound dance and spin and somersault around my head, but that isn’t how this project evolved. I have continually felt the pull of temptation to do the masculine thing and upstage, or inflict sound in a showy, punitive fashion, (especially easy to do with the abrasion present in the work) but I resisted in the view that a spatial representation hewing closer to reality was more grounded. In some senses, that made mixing harder work. The sound from each quadrant was not remarkably differing, more filling out and realising the space. Outside, as Jorge, Ryan and Rees cut branches by the road, it was more immediately dynamic. The verisimilitude a more subtle perceptual creation, or recreation of reality.
What concerns me about this work, is this notion of replicating reality. In encountering spatial sound works, there is a detectable ontological difference in affect when a work exists to place you in a certain environment, to surround you in purported believability, and when a work uses the spatial system as a blank canvas across which to spray and dance, something altogether more ethereal. Of course, there is much bleed between these two approaches, and it’s reductive of me to allude to a categorical analysis, but the distinction is detectable. Is it possible to recreate reality with spatial sound? No, I don’t think so. It’s a print of a reality, but no medium can completely be reality, because that’s not what art is, in my view. What my project does is invite the listener into a reconstructed depiction of a real event, one they may be unfamiliar with.
I am disquieted by the
This is the ontological struggle I find myself wrestling; as much as I enjoy and appreciate more ambient works like ‘18.58’ by Oren Ambarchi and Zimoun on the leeraum label, both very established sound artists, I am unsure how to illustrate how employing spatial sound in my case can be described by any word other than ‘immersive’. That is the expressed intention of this field of environmental-recreation spatial sound, situating the listener at the heart of a new place. Yet, due to trending terminology, ‘immersive’ has been cast in a disdainful light. How to reconcile this, when it is central to my thesis of raising awareness? I partly wish I had more time to dig deeper into this work, exploring it thematically more thoroughly.
I had considered uniting it with visual media, yet quickly disregarded the idea due to time. In the argument of sound needing-or-not-needing the visual in order to convey meaning, (of course both can be true) I feel polarised. Often, I sense the pendulum of perception can easily swing back the other way, into visuals being considered actively detrimental precisely because of a historical association with sound as a lesser medium, or accompanying medium. It’s a reaction I fear, as meaning is so hard for me to parse with sound. I often find myself unaware of the listener, when spatial sound deals directly with their experience in a far more allied sense. Yet I imagine being able to see all the context lost with purely sound; the speed of movement, the pace of work, perceptible dangers, the cold. All aspects critical to informing the listener in a more rounded fashion of the factors involved in the hardship of manual labour, yet all very difficult to represent sonically without becoming performative. Thereby artificial.
I mixed live with pencil-drawn volume automation, both to save time and to engender a reactive approach in listening. First thought, best thought. In some instances where I knew a voice in the centre or left channels would require accentuating, I lowered a roaring car or room tone in the opposing rear and right channels. It surprised me how sculptural this felt, carving away at distinct areas to reveal other layers. Despite that, and largely I blame ear fatigue, I am still conflicted about spatial audio. I think it’s a matter of scale, I’m sure Francois Bayle’s Acousmonium sounds transcendent, but expanding from stereo into M108’s octophonic ring has not dynamically altered my perspective. I have yet to have an epiphanic moment where spatial audio replaced stereo as a truer or more efficacious means of sound creation and performance.