Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Acousmatic sound'

For almost a century composers and engineers have been attempting to create systems that allow drawings and imagery to behave as intuitive and efficient musical scores. Despite the intuitive interactions that these systems afford, they are somewhat underutilised by contemporary composers. The research presented here explores the concept of agency and artificial ecosystems as a means of creating and exploring new graphic sound synthesis algorithms. These algorithms are subsequently designed to investigate the creation of organic musical gesture and texture using granular synthesis. The output of this investigation consists of an original software artefact, The Agent Tool, alongside a suite of acousmatic musical works which the former was designed to facilitate. When designing new musical systems for creative exploration with vast parametric controls, careful constraints should be put in place to encourage focused development. In this instance, an evolutionary computing model is utilised as part of an iterative development cycle. Each iteration of the system’s development coincides with a composition presented in this portfolio. The features developed as part of this process subsequently serve the author’s compositional practice and inspiration. As the software package is designed to be flexible and open ended, each composition represents a refinement of features and controls for the creation of musical gesture and texture. This document subsequently discusses the creative inspirations behind each composition alongside the features and agents that were created. This research is contextualised through a review of established literature on graphic sound synthesis, evolutionary musical computing and ecosystemic approaches to sound synthesis and control.

“Noise Made Visual: Acousmatic Sound and Visual Resonance” is a studio-based PhD project that generates new knowledge about cross-sensory perception and creative, multi-disciplinary practices. This knowledge is communicated through works of contemporary art in conjunction with this exegetical document. The four- year research undertaking was motivated by the following question: How can listening to unfamiliar sounds that are severed from their original visual context of production (second- degree acousmatic sounds) affect the perceptual relationship between sound, sight, and materiality? The recorded sound stimuli used for this inquiry encompass an array of ‘cosmic noises’, which are sounds derived from radio waves or electromagnetic forces in outer space. I surmise that many people are unfamiliar with these types of sounds and the processes involved in their production. In turn, this unfamiliarity can liberate sound perception from established audio-visual relationships that are depended on seeing or knowing the sound’s original source and environment of production. This thesis proposes that liberating sound perception from such visual contexts can promote alternative audio-visual relationships to emerge, specifically between sound qualities and abstract visual textures, surfaces, and shapes. These relationships between sonic and visual qualities can be encapsulated through works of visual art, examples of which are discussed in this paper.
Thesis (PhD Doctorate)
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Queensland College of Art
Arts, Education and Law
Full Text

Ever since the introduction of sound in film, sound effects have played a big part in the experience of the film audience. Acousmatic sound effects are diegetic sounds that lack a visual source on screen, and they are frequently used in horror films. This research explores the relationship between familiarity with sound effects and the emotional response in the audience. An experiment was conducted where two test groups watched an excerpt from a horror film where acousmatic sounds were a big part of the soundtrack. One of the test groups watched a version where there were reoccurring familiar acousmatic sounds, and the other group watched a version with random un-familiar acousmatic sounds. Data was collected through self-report and physiological measurements. The results suggest that there is a dissonance between the conscious and unconscious emotional experience of suspense and fear. The physiological measurements indicate a higher emotional arousal in the group that watched the unfamiliar version of the stimuli, while the self-report propose a stronger conscious build-up of suspense leading to a stronger experience of fear in the group watching the familiar version. Further research directions based on the result of this research are presented.

This practice-based PhD – ‘Inter-piece Sampling and Convolution’ – evolved against the background of composers such as Amon Tobin and Monty Adkins, who use techniques and workflows common to both acousmatic and electronica music. The pieces in this thesis are linked through a sustained commitment to working across these two musical contexts and through their relationships to source materials and pulses. Sound materials have been sampled from within the pieces themselves, and materials from older pieces have been convolved with newer sounds, furthering the connections between pieces. The continual feeding-forward of source material promoted the synchronous development of the conceptual tool: Input, Sculpt, Output, which brought about the evolution of intricate diagrams. All of the pieces are for fixed media, and nine of the ten are in 5.1-format surround sound. The complex web of interrelationships created by the process of sampling and convolving material from previous pieces demanded an innovative means of representation. This representation took on a diagrammatic form in order to facilitate the analysis of a sound’s continuous (re)appropriation, explicated within supporting text. The diagrams indicate the extensive use of sampling and convolution to connect pieces, and include embedded hyperlinks to audio at various stages. As a result, textual analysis of techniques and their implications takes place across multiple pieces, and results in a wider scope for individual commentaries. The hyperlinked nature of the diagrams provides a foundation for further research, and a number of conclusions are posited about the use of sampling and convolution across multiple pieces.

Syfte: Rapportens syfte är att kartlägga om upplevelsen av ett rum kan förändras beroende på om och vilka ljud som spelas upp i rummet.Metod: I samband med en ljudinstallation på Plattan vid Malmö Högskola har rörelsemönster och beteende för Plattans besökare observerats. Dessutom har flera besökare besvarat en enkät.Resultat: Inga eventuella förändringar i rörelsemönstret eller beteendet för Plattans besökare kan ses som en konsekvens av ljudinstallationen. Det finns inte heller någon skillnad i enkätsvaren beroende på installationen. Slutsats: Resultatet ses som en konsekvens av bristfälliga forskningsmetoder. I rapportens slutsats bildas hypotesen att en installerad ljuddesign inte är en tillräcklig åtgärd i den undersökta typen av miljö. Tesen menar att en förändring av ljudmiljön och påverkan på människors upplevelse av rummet i första hand kräver akustiska åtgärder.

Recent advancements in voice-interactive technology such as Apple's Siri application, IBM's Watson, and Google's Now are not just the products of innovative computer scientists; they have been directly influenced by fictional technology. Computer scientists and programmers have openly drawn inspiration from Science Fiction texts such as Gene Roddenberry's television show Star Trek and Stanley Kubrick's 1968 2001: A Space Odyssey in order to create more effective voice-interactive programs. Such comparisons between present-day technology and past Science Fiction (hereafter, Sci-Fi) texts are even more apt than computer scientists seem to have intended; not only are Watson, Siri, and Now real-world versions of fictional computers, but each of them also hides the ways in which the computer is implicitly embodied and gendered by its voice. Real and fictional computers alike are generally voiced by a human: the Star Trek computer by Majel Barrett; Hal-9000 by Douglas Rain; and Watson by Jeff Woodman. Mysteriously, both Apple and Google have worked hard to hide the vocal origins of Siri and Now respectively. But the question remains: why do these programs even have gendered voices? In particular, why is Siri--the digital equivalent of a secretary--female? And why hide their voices' corporeal origins? Aside from technological inspiration, how have the underlying ideological gender assumptions in Sci-Fi texts like 2001 and Star Trek influenced the creation of such programs? What does the fact of the shift from Sci-Fi representations to scientific innovation reveal about the perpetuation of ideological assumptions about gender roles? How do other representations of computer voices confirm or problematize the gendering of computer voices? In this dissertation, I seek to answer these questions by examining the historical, theoretical, and aesthetic trace of the computer voice from Star Trek in 1966 to Siri in 2013. The voice-interactive computer, I argue, may be understood as a paradoxically acousmatic character: a disembodied voice that is simultaneously embodied through non-humanoid computer-objects. Through psychoanalytic interpretations, historical contextualizations, and transtextual considerations, I show how representations of acousmatic computers are positioned within narrative texts as gendered subjects, playing out particular gender roles that are situated within each text's historical context. I attend to the textual problem of location in Sci-Fi by dividing the analyses into two categories: extra-terrestrial and terrestrial. This division is important in understanding the roles of voice-interactive computers, as spaceships provide a uniquely different environment than terrestrial structures such as houses, office buildings, or prisons. Further, spaceships always already imply a womb-like habitat, a mothership that controls and maintains all aspects of the life forms within it; terrestrial computers, on the other hand, tend to connote varying gendered subjectivities and anxieties within historical contexts of technological innovation and cultural change. In this first part, I focus on extra-terrestrial voice-interactive computers in Star Trek (Paramount, 1966-1969), 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968), Dark Star (John Carpenter, 1974), Quark (NBC, 1977-1978), Star Trek: The Next Generation (Paramount, 1987-1994), and Moon (Duncan Jones, 2010). In the second part, I examine terrestrial computers; these computers may be further divided into two, gendered subsections of masculine and feminine functions. The texts featuring masculine-voiced computers tend to act as the son to their programmer/creator fathers or, conversely, as all-knowing fathers, thereby reinforcing patriarchal rule. These films, Colossus: The Forbin Project (Joseph Sargent, 1970), THX 1138 (George Lucas, 1971), Rollerball (Norman Jewison, 1975), and Demon Seed (Donald Cammell, 1977), narrativize cultural and business struggles in the 1970s surrounding militarization and corporatization. I then examine the films of the early 1980s, TRON (Steven Lisberger, 1982) and Electric Dreams (Steven Barron, 1984), that express a rapidly-changing cultural conception of computers, set in narratives of homosocial struggle. And finally, I discuss computers in the 1990s and 2000s that serve in domestic roles, particularly those texts that feature domestic spaces run by female-voiced computers or, literally, house-wives. These texts, Fortress (Stuart Gordon, 1992), Smart House (LeVar Burton, 1999), and Eureka (SyFy, 2006-2012), position computers as replacements for human women who are absent from the home. Additionally, I examine two texts that feature male servants--Demon Seed (an anomaly among representations of domestic servitude) and Iron Man (Jon Favreau, 2008). I then return to Siri by examining representations of her programming, voice, and body in popular culture. By thus exploring the representations of gendered acousmatic computers within the context of computer history and changing gender norms, I self-reflexively examine how artificial intelligence may be presented in a gendered context, and how this may reflect changing notions of gender in digital culture.

This paper is a comparative analysis between two digitally mediated live poetry performances: Frikativ by Jörg Piringer and This Loud by Amy X Neuburg. More specifically, I examine how these poets use digital technology in their live performances to challenge traditional notions of the human voice. My main argument is that their modes of exerting controlling over their voices ultimately serve similar purposes; those of establishing the voice as a relationship between speaker and listener, a phenomenon rather than a discreet object or bodily organ possible to observe on its own. This phenomenological point of view draws on Karen Barad’s concept of posthumanist performativity as well as on philosophical works on the voice, such as Mladen Dolar's A Voice and Nothing More. Moreover, I give an historical account of sound poetry, tape poetry and tape loops as they relate to Frikativ and This Loud. In this, I also discuss live-looping; a technique used by both Piringer and Neuburg and connect it to Gilles Deleuze's ideas of difference and repetition. Finally, Piringer's and Neuburg's works is compared based on how they attempt to control the voices-as-relations in their performances. My conclusion is that Frikativ constantly destabilizes the establishment and recognition of voice-as-relation. This Loud, due to the extensive and focused use of live-looping, does not destabilize as much as it multiplies the possible configurations of voices-as-relations.

This practice-based research is concerned with a collection of fixed media compositions written between 2005 and 2012 with accompanying contextual writing. The primary focus of this research was to produce sound works, but the concept of place has played a significant role throughout both the compositional process and in the reflection of each composition. This research explores how place is ‘heard and felt’ (Feld, 2005) in a composition and how recollected memory impacts on the compositional process. Artistic decisions made with regard to creating the compositions reflect my personal place and associations with these sound materials at a given time whether they are field recordings or synthesised materials. The way in which sound material is subsequently processed and structured reflects this. Place and the compositional practice inform each other in a two-way process. This results in what Katharine Norman (2010) has referred to in her writing on sound art as an ‘autoethnographic’ journey; a representation of the creator’s personal experience. I have begun to reflect on these compositions as art works that represent a particular time or place. The artwork represents the trace of the place from which it was composed (Corringham, 2010). I believe that I cannot totally transport a person to my place; rather, I intend this creative representation to enable the listener to create and inspire their own narrative.

Detta kandidatarbete handlar om utforskningen inom alternativa ljudspelsformer. Vi ville utforska vilken ny kunskap som kan hämtas från spelljudsteori när den applicerades i ett ljudbaserat rörelsespel. Vi försöker uppnå detta genom en iterativ och experimentell designprocess. Vi skapade två olika ljudbaserade spelprototyper där vi applicerade olika spelljudsteorier. Genom att designa prototyper och analysera dem, genom induktivt resonemang och deltagande observation, kunde vi observera att spelaren kunde använda icke-visuella gränssnitt i ett ljudbaserat rörelsespel. Som resultat presenterar vi processens mest avgörande designproblem. Utmaningen med att utveckla icke-visuella gränssnitten var att instruera spelaren i att använda dem genom icke-vokala ljud. Vi presenterar även ett nytt sätt att förstå akusmatiska ljud i icke-visuella ljudbaserade spel. Som avslutande del så diskuteras undersökningens relevans och framtida undersökningsområden föreslås.
This bachelor thesis is about exploration within alternative forms of audio game. We wanted to explore what new knowledge could be extracted from game audio theory when it is applied to a movement based audio game. We aim to do this through an iterative and experimental design process. We created two different audio game prototypes where different game audio theories were applied. By designing prototypes and analyzing them, through inductive reasoning and participant observation, we could observe that players were able to use non-visual interfaces in an non-visual audio game. As our results we present the process’s most critical design problems. The challenge in creating these non-visual interfaces was instructing the player on how to use them through non-vocal audio. We also present a new way of understanding acousmatic sound in non-visual audio games. Lastly the study’s relevance is discussed and future research areas are suggested.

There is an arguable lack of activity and interest in the analysis of electroacoustic music when compared to its composition and performance. The absence of a strong and active analytical community is very concerning, as it should be a fundamental part of any larger musical community that wishes for works to be performed and discussed in later years. The problems that face electroacoustic music analysis are that there is no consensus or single analytical tool/methodology that dictates how such an activity should be undertaken. Rather than attempting to appropriate existing tools meant for traditional musics or create a new universal one this thesis will argue that a new culture should be adopted that promotes different opinions on the subject of electroacoustic music analysis, as opposed to defining a consensus as to how it should be conducted. To achieve this the thesis will: evaluate and critique what constitutes and defines electroacoustic music analysis; provide a general and flexible procedure to conduct an analysis of an electroacoustic work; develop a set of criteria and terms to cross-examine the current analytical tools for electroacoustic music in order to define the gaps in the field and to identify pertinent elements within electroacoustic works; analyse a number of electroacoustic works to test and implement the ideas raised within this thesis; and finally the concept of an analytical community (in which such a culture could exist) is outlined and implemented with the creation of the OREMA (Online Repository for Electroacoustic Music Analysis) project. This universal approach will cover both epistemological and ontological levels of electroacoustic music analysis. All of the concepts raised above are interlinked and follow the main hypothesis of this thesis: • There is no one single analysis that can fully investigate a work; • Analyses are a perspective on a work, ultimately formed through the subjective perception of the analyst; • These perspectives should be shared with other practitioners to help develop a better understanding of the art form. This PhD study was part of the New Multimedia Tools for Electroacoustic Music Analysis project (2010-2013) funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK). Other outcomes of that project included the various analysis symposiums held at De Montfort University in Leicester and the electroacoustic analysis software EAnalysis created by Pierre Couprie.

Thesis (M.M.)--University of North Texas, 2002.
A two-week event in four parts: invitation, installation, reception, and thank-you card. Installation for 2 hosts, 2 ushers, photographer, 4 posers, exerciser, sound persons, and blindfolded guests, with a mix of live and recorded sounds. Includes instructions for performance. Includes bibliographical references (p. 66-67).

Cette thèse porte sur le concept d’objet sonore, élaboré par le fondateur du mouvement esthétique nommé « musique concrète » : Pierre Schaeffer, auteur de plusieurs ouvrages consacrés à la perception du son dans une perspective musicale. A travers la généalogie de ce concept devenu très populaire en musique contemporaine, nous cherchons d’abord à montrer comment se construit une pensée esthétique originale par l’apport de modèles théoriques variés : sciences naturelles, linguistique, et surtout philosophie de la perception contemporaine – phénoménologie, structuralisme et théorie de la forme. Le concept d’objet sonore se construit en effet aussi bien par des gestes techniques – enregistrement et manipulation du son fixé, situation acousmatique – que par des gestes intellectuels radicaux – suspension de la référence au contexte d’émission du son, refus de la perspective de la physique acoustique, donc de l’explication du phénomène sonore au profit de sa description morphologique, étude généralisée de nos fonctions d’écoute (acoulogie). Cette appréhension du son « pour lui-même », qui se pense comme une application de l’épochè phénoménologique à l’écoute (écoute réduite) nous invite à penser les rapports ambigus pouvant se tisser entre une esthétique musicale particulière et la philosophie de la perception qu’elle convoque pour penser son objet. Plus généralement, ce travail vise donc à décrire le rôle d’une certaine philosophie de la perception dans l’émergence d’une appréhension plastique du phénomène sonore, phénomène qui résiste pourtant d’emblée à l’objectivation
This doctoral dissertation focuses on the concept of sound object, coined by the founder of the “musique concrète” aesthetic movement Pierre Schaeffer – who wrote several essays dedicated to the perception of sound within a musical perspective. In studying the genealogy of this concept which has become very popular in contemporary music, we first wish to show how the reunion of varied theoretical models helps to build an original aesthetic reflection – natural science, linguistics, and above all the philosophy of contemporary perception (phenomenology, structuralism and Gestalt theory). Indeed, the concept of sound object is the result of both technical gestures – recording and manipulation of the recorded sound, acousmatic situation – and intellectual and radical moves such as the absence of reference to the context of sound production, the refusal to use the theoretical frame of acoustic physics (thus enabling the morphological description of the sound phenomenon to take precedence over the explanation of such phenomenon), the general study of our listening functions (acoulogy). Such perception of the sound “for itself” is to be viewed as the application of the phenomenological epoché to the listening activity (reduced listening), and leads us to consider the ambiguous relationships between a particular musical aesthetics and the philosophy of perception required to analyse its object. More generally, our study thus intends to describe the role played by a certain philosophy of perception in the appearance of a plastic perception of the sound phenomenon, though such phenomenon initially resists objectification

Contém 1 ficheiro audio para ser consultado na Biblioteca
Este projeto procura refletir as experiências que levam à aprendizagem num ambiente sonoro onde o sujeito constitui apreensões do espaço por ação da experiência auditiva. É de grande importância o estudo dos trabalhos de Jean-Marie Schaeffer e Merleau-Ponty de modo a que estes ambientes sejam preparados sobre uma conduta estética de apreciação das qualidades percetivas da audição humana e do som como uma ferramenta funcional. Através da análise das propriedades acústicas do som e das propriedades auditivas, este projeto tenta desenvolver uma problemática que entende os processos pelos quais o ser-humano se relaciona com o espaço acústico e adquire informação sobre este procurando formas de interativas de aprendizagem
This project searches to reflect on experiences that lead to learning in a sound environment where the subject makes sense of space by the product of auditive experience. It's of big relevance the study of Marleau-Ponty and Jean-Marie Schaeffer works so that these environments can be made under an aesthethic conduct on appreciation of perceptual sound qualities and how human perceive them as a functional tool. Through the analysis of acoustic properties of sound and human audition, this project tries to understand the processes by which the human being relates with the acoustic space and how he acquires information about it by means interactive learning.

Many commentators experience difficulties describing and analyzing Morton Feldman's String Quartet no. 2 (1983), implying that the quartet eludes stable ascriptions of meaning. Feldman's own philosophy frames these difficulties as symptoms of an antagonism between direct experience and post-hoc understanding of music, a dichotomy tacitly supported in much related discourse. I critique this proposed rift between understanding and experience by analyzing how String Quartet no. 2 prompts listeners to repeatedly reconsider their own experiences. Obfuscated instrumentation, transformations of repeated phrases, and disorienting formal returns challenge one's perception, pattern recognition, and musical memory, leading audiences to return to linguistic interpretation in an effort to comprehend what they hear. Drawing on writing by Lawrence Kramer, I show that the compulsion to voice these uncertainties is not a result of a separation of understanding and experience, but of the blurring of these categories. Vacillation between close listening and interpretation also typifies experiences of the music of Helge Sten, produced under the pseudonym Deathprod. For the album Imaginary Songs from Tristan da Cunha (1996), Sten transfers recorded violin improvisations to wax phonograph cylinders, clouding attributions of the music's manner of production. Incorporating Brian Kane's theory of acousmatic sound, I demonstrate that the resultant spacing of sound and source provokes listeners to oscillate between attending to the music's material properties and struggling to identify its meaning and cause. Work by Jonathan Sterne indicates that historical techniques of hearing associated with the antiquated medium of the phonograph cylinder prolong and complicate this mode of listening. As with Feldman's quartet, auditors of Imaginary Songs endlessly fluctuate between attempting to understand and striving to listen closely to the music.
Graduate

L’expérience sonore immersive est souvent associée à la spatialisation du son. Mais, le phénomène d’immersion est plutôt complexe et le réduire au seul emploi d’un dispositif technique ne permet pas d’en apprécier les causes multiples sur le plan de la réception. Ce mémoire présente un projet de recherche-création intitulé Cathédrales, dont l’objectif est de mieux comprendre la réception d’une œuvre de musique acousmatique spa- tialisée en 3D et intentionnellement immersive. Ce travail porte notamment sur les stratégies de composition adoptées et leurs effets, au regard des intentions de départs et de l’analyse des commentaires émis par un ensemble d’auditeurs-participants. Les trois premiers chapitres présentent les aspects conceptuels soutenant la démarche de création des œuvres Ville Aux Cent Clochers et Réverbérence. Le premier chapitre vise à préciser d’entrée de jeu ce que signifie l’immersion sonore, de sa compréhension plus générale jusqu’à ses significations plus particulières; le deuxième chapitre présente ensuite l’immersion sous l’angle d’une narratologie naturelle de la musique; tandis que le troisième chapitre intègre cette approche narrative au langage du cinéma pour l’oreille et adapte le tout au contexte multidirectionnel du médium de diffusion sonore. Les deux parties qui composent l’œuvre Cathédrales : I. Ville Aux Cent Clochers et II. Réverbérence, sont présentées au quatrième chapitre. Après avoir introduit le propos de l’œuvre dans son ensemble, les intentions et les stratégies spécifiques à chacune de ces pièces y sont également développées. Enfin, le cinquième chapitre présente les résultats de deux études de réception, impliquant un certain nombre d’auditeurs, sur l’écoute de musiques spatialisées pour dôme de haut-parleurs. L’analyse esthésique découlant de ces enquêtes permet de proposer différentes catégories conceptuelles de l’expérience sonore immersive. Ces catégories peuvent éventuellement servir à schématiser les effets de certaines stratégies de composition, combinées à l’emploi d’un dispositif technologique particulier, sur la réception d’une musique spatialisée en 3D.
The immersive sound experience is often associated with sound spatialization. But the immersive phenomenon is rather complex and reducing it to the sole usage of a technical device does a disservice to our appreciation of its multiple causes in terms of a work’s reception. This memoir presents a research-creation project, entitled Cathédrales, that aims to better understand the reception of an intentionally immersive 3Dspatialized acousmatic music. This work focuses on the adopted compositional strategies and their effects, with regard to initial intentions and the analysis of comments made by listener participants. The first three chapters present the concepts underlying the creative process for the works Ville Aux Cent Clochers ("City of a hundred bell towers") and Réverbérence ("Reverberence"). The first chapter clarifies the meaning of sound immersion from the outset, from its more general understanding to its more specific meanings; the second chapter then presents immersion under the scope of a natural narratology of music; while the third chapter integrates such narrative approach within the language of a "cinema for the ear", while adapting it to the multidirectional context of the sound diffusion medium. In the fourth chapter are presented the two parts composing Cathédrales ("Cathedrals") : I. Ville Aux Cent Clochers and II. Réverbérence. After introducing the concept of the work as a whole, the intentions and strategies that are more specific to each part of the work are then exposed. Finally, the fifth chapter presents the results of two case studies on the reception behaviors of multiple participants listening to spatialized music over a loudspeakers dome. Aesthesic analysis arising from these surveys allows to provide different conceptual categories of the immersive sound experience. Such categorization may eventually serve to schematize the effects of certain compositional strategies, in combination with the usage of a particular technological device, on the reception of 3D spatialized music.

Listen. If I ask you to listen, what is it that I ask of you—that you will understand, or perhaps obey? Or is it some sort of readiness that is requested? What occurs with a body in the act of listening? How do sound and voice structure audio-visual-spatial relations in concrete situations? This doctoral thesis in fine arts consists of six artworks and an essay that documents the research process, or rather, acts as a travelogue as it stages and narrates a series of journeys into a predominantly sonic ecology. One entry into this field is offered by the animal “voice” and attempts to teach animals to speak human language. The first journey concerns a specific case where humanoid sounds were found to emanate from an unlikely source—the blowhole of a dolphin. Another point of entry is offered by the acousmatic voice, a voice split from its body, and more specifically, my encounter with the disembodied voice of Steve Buscemi in a prison in Philadelphia. This listening experience triggered a fascination with, and an inquiry into, the voices that exist alongside us, the parasitic relation that audio technology makes possible, and the way an accompanying voice changes one’s perceptions and even one’s behavior. In the case of both the animal and the acousmatic, the seemingly trivial act of attending to a voice quickly opens up a complex space of embodied entanglements with the potential to challenge much of what we take for granted. At the heart of my inquiry is a series of artworks made between 2012 and 2016, which constitute a third journey: the performance Limit-Cruisers (#1 Sphere), the praxis session Limit-Cruisers (#2 Crowd), the installations Therapy in Junkspace, Fluorescent You, and “Then, ere the bark above their shoulders grew,” and the lecture performance Articulations from the Orifice (The Dry and the Wet). The relationship between what is seen and heard is being explored and renegotiated in the arts and beyond. We are increasingly addressed by prerecorded and synthetic voices in both public and private spaces. Simultaneously, our notions of human communication are challenged and complicated by recent research in animal communication. My work attempts to address the shifts and complexities embodied in these developments. The three journeys are deeply entwined with theoretical inquiries into human-animal relationships, technology, and the philosophy of sound. In the essay, I consider as well how other artistic practices are exploring this same complex space. What I put forward is a materialist and concrete approach to listening understood as a situated practice. Listening is both a form of co-habitation and an ecology. In and through listening, I claim, one could be said to perform in concert with the things heard while at the same time being changed by them.

Avhandlingen är även utgiven i serien: Malmö Faculty of Fine and Performing Arts, Lund University: DoctoralStudies and Research in Fine and Performing Arts, 16. ISSN: 1653-8617

La version intégrale de ce mémoire est disponible uniquement pour consultation individuelle à la Bibliothèque de musique de l’Université de Montréal (www.bib.umontreal.ca/MU).
L’hypothèse d’une influence réciproque entre l’environnement et notre perception sonore représente la base de ma recherche musicale. Villusions est un projet acousmatique qui puise sa source dans l’analyse introspective de cette complexe relation, plus précisément entre les sons du quotidien et l’oreille curieuse d’un voyageur éternel. Les parties les plus intimement liées à mes expériences personnelles de la ville de Montréal et ses banlieues représentent donc le théâtre de cette exploration assidue; les illusions correspondent à trois pièces acousmatiques inspirées par ce contexte de réciprocité. Dans l’ensemble des œuvres présentées, les moments musicaux s’alternent, s’intègrent et se confondent aux éléments sonores naturels qui en constituent souvent la racine génératrice. Ces matériaux ont été développés suivant trois axes principaux : d’abord l’axe des mouvements, associés aux moyens de transport et aux centres névralgiques à travers lesquels se répandent les impulsions de la ville; ensuite l’axe des voix qui témoigne de sa multiethnicité, de sa lymphe vitale; finalement, l’axe de l’alternance des saisons comme prétexte sonore lié au contexte temporel. Des sources sonores instrumentales, dérivées des tablâ et de la harpe, trouvent également leur place dans le projet, en lui donnant une empreinte à la fois rythmique et harmonique. La composante spatiale doit être considérée comme un élément incontournable du discours musical de Villusions. Sa construction octophonique porte sur l’équilibre, délicat et illusoirement immersif, généré par des trajectoires dessinées sur la même ligne temporelle que celle des évènements musicaux, suivant des stratégies intégrées directement dans le processus compositionnel.
This musical research is based on the theory of interaction between the environment and our sound perception. Villusions is an acousmatic project that emerged from the introspective analysis of this complex relationship, in particular between daily sounds and the curious ear of an eternal traveller. Thus, the parts most closely related to my personal experiences in the city (“ville”) of Montréal and its suburbs are where this diligent exploration took place; the illusions are three acousmatic pieces inspired by this context of reciprocity. In the works presented, musical moments alternate, integrate with each other, and merge with the natural sound elements that often constitute the originating roots. This material was developed with three main focuses: firstly, movement, associated with modes of transportation and the nerve centres through which beats the city’s pulse; secondly, the voices that express its multi ethnicity, its vital lymph; and, lastly, the changing of the seasons as an acoustic proxy related to the temporal context. Instrumental sound sources, derived from the tablâ and the harp, are also used in the project, lending both a rhythmic and a harmonic feel. The spatial component should be seen as an essential element of the musical discourse of Villusions. Its octophonic construction features the delicate and deceptively immersive balance created by trajectories drawn on the same timeline as those of the musical events, using techniques directly integrated into the compositional process.