Markus Noisternig, an artist in residence at the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, known as Empac, giving a “spatial audio” performance there.CreditNathaniel Brooks for The New York Times
TROY, N.Y. — If you’ve spent any time at children’s birthday parties, you probably know what an inflated balloon sounds like when rubbed: harsh, squeaky, not particularly resonant.
“Rubbed-balloon sound” might not seem like a sonic texture you’d place much stock in if you were creating a musical work. But how would that change if you were listening from inside the balloon? The composer Natasha Barrett decided to answer the question. She put a 3-D microphone in a balloon, pressed the record button and got down to some serious rubbing.
On Monday morning, at a “spatial audio” lecture at Empac — the experimental media and performing arts center that is part of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute here — Ms. Barrett’s interior-balloon 3-D recording was played in an acoustical marvel of a concert hall, outfitted with one of the world’s most advanced ambisonic systems.
As Ms. Barrett’s 3-D audio file was piped into the loudspeakers — there are 64, positioned both around and over listeners — the sound of her balloon manipulations was enveloping. Smeared textures whipped around listeners’ heads along a wild variety of trajectories. Variations of pressure and phrase-length registered as legitimately musical. Discrete lines of vibration converged, with a triumphant air, before splitting apart again.
But there wasn’t much time to linger over Ms. Barrett’s startling spatialized recording. Presenters and participants at Empac’s Spatial Audio Summer Workshop had a lot of ground to cover, and only five days to get hands-on experience with tools that are rarely available under one roof.
One goal of the workshop, the first of its kind at Empac, was to provide the nearly two dozen participants — including engineers, acoustic consultants and composers — with a rare chance to learn about working with what specialists call high-density loudspeaker arrays, like the one needed to play Ms. Barrett’s recordings. Another goal was to present a pair of public concerts as part of Empac’s impressive, general slate of experimental music programming.
On Monday evening, the first concert was led, as was that morning’s lecture, by Markus Noisternig, an artist in residence at Empac who is a researcher from the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (or Ircam) in Paris. His lecture and concert highlighted both the ambisonic surround-sound speaker system and one of Empac’s new, and most highly prized, objects: a Wave Field Synthesis system. (These two discrete systems, which can also be blended, were temporarily installed at Empac’s concert hall.)
The wave system, a modular array of more than 500 speakers, uses acoustical trickery to reproduce organic sounds with unusually high fidelity. It can also “place” (and seem to move, quickly) those eerily lifelike tones at specific coordinates. Any but the most superficial kind of explanation of how this is possible tends to involve high math (like Bessel functions). But if you had to describe the effect, you might go for trippy and exciting.
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Empac, at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y. CreditNathaniel Brooks for The New York Times
Toying with spatially separated sounds is not a new fascination for composers. The conductor Alan Gilbert charted a lineage of such explorations in a 2012 New York Philharmonic concert, from a portion of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” to works by Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez. (Boulez being, not at all coincidentally, the founder of Ircam.) But as computing power has increased, digital systems have become more precise and more portable, if still expensive to design and install.
Systems like Wave Field Synthesis can also change approaches to pieces conceived using earlier technologies. A highlight on Monday night was Mr. Noisternig’s presentation of “Ricercare una melodia,” by the composer Jonathan Harvey. This 1984 work was originally scored for a live trombone player and tape delay (with speakers bordering the audience on two sides). In what he called a new interpretation, Mr. Noisternig looped the live playing of the trombonist Benny Sluchin using a 248-speaker section of Empac’s 500-speaker array, which was positioned behind Mr. Sluchin.
Using Ircam-designed software, Mr. Noisternig placed eerily live-sounding reproductions of Mr. Sluchin’s playing at various points along the array. In most tape-loop performances, novice listeners can tell the difference between what is being played live and what is being reproduced electronically. But this “Ricercare” performance had a suaveness of blended tone that seemed both organic and otherworldly.
So, do you need a fancy hall with spatial-audio bells and whistles to appreciate these sounds? In an interview, Mr. Noisternig said that the true nature of such pieces could not be appreciated in traditional stereo mixes. There are headphones capable of simulating 3-D audio — made more accessible by the boom in virtual reality technology — but they, too, provide only approximations of the concert hall experience.
“He slowly fell and transformed into the terrain,” a 2016 piece by Ms. Barrett, received its American premiere on Monday night, courtesy of 49 speakers in Empac’s ambisonic system. It seemed like the most carefully designed entry in the program’s purely electronic portion — her whirligig 3-D designs rarely seeming to be in motion merely because the technology permits it.
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Source: NY Times