Notes on the experience of multichannel composition

I can define an immersive context as the sensory environment specifically excited in order to stimulate significant state of cognitive awareness. A multichannel sound composed environment is a spacial area where sound stimuli are dynamically perceived as space definitions, changing in time and changed by a sophisticated experience of compositional and dramatic music time.

1) The state of confusion/ambiguity concerning the sound location and its expressive roles. When you are experiencing a sound work without assigned music gestural pre-conditions, sound presences become acoustic gestures in space. This, under specific environmental suggestions, can induce a perceptual disposal to first interpreting the event under the category of physical events more than under the one of linguistic event. The fruition of an immersive multichannel context – also in a proper studio set up - radically induce a perceptual abandon; it’s a physical stimulation acting at many cognitive levels, dealing more with space orientation and space restructuring, with its instinctual unpredictability, than with linear – alphabetic, denotative, musicological - attitudes to reconstruct the articulated line of pre-understood music symbols.

Perceptual awareness, as a basic phenomenon, is often expressed as the awareness of an exclusive experience, innovative and immediately labeled and sharable:
we have been frequently reported about these aesthetic/cognitive rewards interviewing our not-specialized public. A standard cycle of knowledge, also re-thinkable in perceiving-knowing-sharing-interpreting-knowing-sharing, seems to dim into the experience of an archetypal body exposure: physical/perceptual neo-naturalistic stimuli and variously controlled context-signals (like distance markers, warning sounds, localized story telling), organized inside the environmental multichannelling inputs provokes on visitors cognitive states similar to the joy of a discovering free dance than to the joy of understanding sound relations in time.

2) To be in(to), as a living continuous process; this is the condition to understand a sound immersive context, before any specific judgment concerning the aesthetic pleasure received by the interpretation of the “hyper-narrative time/sounding flow”. The visitor receives multiple feedbacks throughout the time you spend into the context; the pre-understanding is relatively important and frequently distracting or surprising but never invalidating the meaning of the music experience as part of the “being in” contextual experience. How the multichannel composition is technically able to inform the composer while studio designing and composing the virtual space is still under reflection. The transfiguration of the local listening space instructed by the multichannel sound experience is the phenomenon that radically characterizes the composer’s professional skills to project immersiveness and architectural coherent acoustic solutions. Mixing down on site is also a fundamental tool.

3) Vivacity of the space, vitality of the site: we are describing a nonlinear time experience; the conception is nonlinear and nonlinear are conceived the potential behavioral re-constructions of the narrative universe, full of variously designed and related multi-sensory experiences. An invitation to a complex series of environmental events you cannot linearly follow or re-experience but that you can understand through an inter-event-score, a macro map of events, allowing the visitor to comprehend the wide intentional, composed and designed nonlinear environment of stimuli.
An example, at the sonic garden lab in Firenze (IT) – the most intensive and assisted of our medium term installations - visitors do not ask for re-experiencing a same sound set, they are satisfied (and rewarded) to find out that the welcoming sonic horticultural space is offering a sound-scape challenging them and continuously changing, according to a certain understandable range of environmental data variations. Nonlinear doesn’t mean open form, though it includes open form inter-actions: the meta-structure exists as a denoted and repeatable one. Open is the range of cognitive attitudes, real behaviors and recognizable music relations through which starting the multi-sensory experience.
We ca call it guided interpretation or a live media art action, assigning to the visitors a consistent role in the holistic jump-cut, the master editing inside the multi-sources experience.

4) The music formal coherence is less relevant and pertinent; the archetypical relations are stronger and can outline a very short time identity music unit:
suspension, attack, release, detachment, sequencing, the reprise, variation, recursivity, redundancy, recognizability: they guide the physical memory of the experience maker. How they can produce a stratified experience is up to the sophistication applied by the whole articulation and by the experience maker himself; but in this specific context the meaning of compositional coherence is indeed very different from any pure music language analysis: a sound event is judicable in a time unit that has to be expressive in the moment the perception is stimulated. The memory of previous timbers and structural events and flows is not affecting the evaluation of the efficiency of the specific immediate event. The time unit perception is very oscillating and tends to be short also during the multichannel studio work.
If it has a meaning to have a “multichannel studio perception”, this has to be further discussed; i do assume that when we produce multichannel sound compositions in studio, we are mainly simulating the physical experience then taking place in a real architectural context. It’s is a studio preparation of a living immersive human habitat, enhanced by the sound articulation.

5) The behavioral understanding and body mixing of multi-sources are a substitution of the former music score -intended as an intimate process to get acquaintance to music forms and thei time identity. In the multichannel listening experience both the body-choreographic media chasing behavior - mainly when the composition is applied to the architectural outdoor and wide space design - and the mental landscape reconstruction behavior – mainly when you mentally experience a sound motion and the sound presences in space, with their roles and the whole induced new indoor and small spaces design - are clear knowledge experiences: Following the moving symbolic presences/moving your body towards symbolic presences, objects locations, actions and intentions; vertical and horizontal stances, dynamic pitch ranges, change of state and locality in time; these all are clear and often radical mnemonic states, also conceived to didactically enhance once’s attitude to detect and control his own media daily life experience, becoming portable comparable models, outside the enhanced area.

6) In the multichannel experience time does not belong to the authority of the music speech but to the expressive strength of the transfigured experience space.

7) The connection between mechanical and industrial noise characterizing urban sound-scapes and the contenporary sound research make further on understandable the didactic work behind a multichannel mix down and its environmental contextualization. The behavioral nonlinear attitude in spacial symbolic definition - with its many open and interpretable relationships -, plus the life-alike sounding co-extended music spectrum -as conceived so far in my work - can outline a familiarity and continuity between the artificial, composed and visionary sound-scapes and the city life ones. They can and must interfere one-another because they belong to the same contemporary cultural landscape we are trying to re-model and re-design, instead of simply denying it. The importance of not yet established music gestures and articulations during a urban space composition/definition, both from the composer and from the experience maker sides, stays exactly in the assumption that the real and average contemporary sound experience is upgrading the meaning and idea of noise, according to a new cultural sound-scape, grown out from the industrial music production, the experimental music scenes and the public listening techniques of postwar sound system diffusion.

Some stereo mix down compositional hints:

1) Essential stances in music duration and music internal relations. In stereophonic sound mixing, roles and music presences are subjected to a strict analysis of proportions between the stereophonic space sound location and the compositional meaning given by a strong author’s intentionality. The space is defined and imposes restrictions to sound presences in terms of stereophonic space location, internal dynamic and sound processing in time behavior. The music piece time unit can be produced by the existence of a score - as a time/understanding formal and didactic mediation, denoting a restricted numbers of possible interpretations of the piece called original – or by the happening of redundancies embodied in the hearable music piece - as in the popular music understanding, consolidated after the music recording technologies and industries advent.

2) Functional recognition already exists in the experience of the stereophonic space as a datum space: there are sound speech cognitions already working in the allocation of meanings and functions in the theatre space (the space driven by the multichannel composition is often very theatrical-expressive-physically surprising but does not refer to the traditional theatrical space); this induce a wide number of requirements, both in listening and in formal distribution of events and their development in time.

3) Clarity of functions and roles. Clarity in mixing, the mixing is not made by the listener and composer induced postures and gestures but by an intentional mixing and compositional fixed understanding.

4) Stereo mix down assumes an “exact context” of re-listening to as a pre-condition to get acquaintance to the structural articulation of the piece. This is true also today, when the hi-fi standard is so low and the stereo mix down is standardizing in high compression and restricted frequency richness in time (they would generate too many conflicts: the issue of the development in time of many timber and formal intuitions due to the mixing techniques is another interesting issue to be reflected further on).

5) The composition is finished and it’s already in its sharable state, this means that the space of fruition is not affecting the compositional meaning. The stereo system is a system that does not require a space particular distribution of sound in a particular space. This also means that to finish a piece gives a strongly required internal coherency which idea of time is also manageable by the pure existence of the linguistic piece.

Eindhoven based computer scientist and SED network member Tijn Borghuis asks some questions:

- How does the time identity change, is time “faster” in the stereo version compared to the 5.1 version (more events in the same amount of time), or does it work in a different way?

the issue “quantity of events in the same amount of time” opens the question of multiple (acoustic) stimuli in the same amount of time perceivable by a human body; this is relevant in terms of interpretation of the music piece; but also concerns the definition and meaning of time implied by the music experience. The perception of a music identity belongs to the ability of a piece to be read as a continuous intentional research of coherence: in this sense time identity is stretched according to your ability to follow, stop, remember, chasing, forget, leave… though actually the time identity is “absolutely” intentional; once you miss this coherence the cognitive game willing to achieve the author’s music and time identity starts or it’s lost.
Time is the ontology of music, but the compositional time in its stereophonic and theatre-simulacre is a prototypical time, a counter-public time, in this sense creating a multichannel time music context deals more with a contextual and immediate, transitory, short and self-consistent time unit, close to the urban time flow, full of unintentional - but hetero-intentional - events.
We are assuming a perceptual limit in understanding simultaneous events and the dynamic (sound) spaces we are acousticly generating as a factual nonlinearity or multiple linearity - organizing multiple media encounters and memories.

- Do you find a systematic relation between spatial and temporal complexity of the sound in going from 5.1 to stereo?

temporal and spatial complexity is the condition of a sound-scape, where the overall control of living acoustic events is commissioned to the personal and environmental active response. This said, it’s necessary to introduce another category to define the compositional state under experience: environmental sound complexity is due to the sound multichannel wide diffusion and to the interactive variables we include inside the compositional intention.
My personal 5.1 compositional states are often affected by their environmental destination. A part from this strong awareness, from 5.1 to stereophonic listening the stylistic reduction happens in terms of essentialness, need of clear stances, roles, relations; a “length” becomes “why waiting”? a “start” becomes “where are you heading to?”, “what kind of sound set will come out next and why?”: the release is a suspension that requires a variation, the detachment is a principle to make a panels-work systematic, the sequence is a matter of dimension to be chosen: rhythmical, melodic, harmonic; the reprise is a clear form in terms of memory of a “meaningful structure”. All this “reductions” are not required by the multichannel time events and presences composition. Space is multichannel composition main intention, space is its vocation, space intended as the place where you are now living and listening to, a space outside the music work, not the space existing anyway inside the stereo music piece.
We are assuming that space is definable as a sharable environment with physical characteristics, with more or less awareness of its consistency included in the 5.1 piece; we are also assuming that space can be restructured by the sound enhancement of its properties and of its symbolic functions.

- Thinking about this could help in understanding why the pieces work in the Giardino Sonoro. Perhaps there is a certain minimum complexity in the sound necessary to create immersion?

Continuous and extended complexity - short time identities, strong short terms memory cues - and its wide distribution in space, all around the garden - the extended multi-sensory work that the garden is. It’ also important to remember that in order to generate a cognitive immersion it’s often required a linguistic door, a suspension of the everyday life perceptual standard. It has often been the role of the horticultural presences, ideally and practically, the main door to access an immersive context, then it came the sound abstraction, and its relatively rare reference to previous experiences to accompany inside the alter-sound-scape. What is significantly working in our environmental multi-sensory installations is the balance between the impact of real city noise aggression and the gentle, human scale sound pressure of our environmental sound surroundings. Tiny and variously articulated sounds, zoomorphic and anthropomorphic presences and relation, while outside the standard of sound and noises is unfortunately a war-like sound pressure.
I do also think that to set visitors free from an imposed fruition model will always imply to be entrusted by them: any content variability and unpredictability is accepted as a natural variation according to the assumption that what i son is a living context. Nature (but also architecture) has often been in our work the main naturalizer of abstraction, allowing a wide range of discovering attitudes and gestures otherwise from the self-control daily behavioral range.

- If so, the compression you describe perhaps achieves the required complexity in time when it can no longer be created in space (probably not a correct metaphor, but it reminded me of the possibility of swapping spatial (storage) complexity for time (calculation) complexity in the design of an algorithm in computer science).

For sure what you achieve in time complexity is never a direct transfer of space complexity; the stereophonic version needs a simpler and clearer time identity, concentrating events, bringing them to their strongest essentiality, coherency, related states, paying attention to their internal and compositional reasons; if i take a multiple and coincident event and re-divide it inside a wider time multichannelling flow, it’s a real translation, interpretation, from one spacial language to another one. It’s an interesting point for sure, many different techniques can be usefull to the purpose.