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Investigating Sound in Space: Five meanings of space in music and sound art*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 July 2015

Frederico Macedo
Frederico Macedo*
Affiliation:
UDESC, Av. Madre Benvenuta, 2007, Itacorubi, Florianópolis 88035–001, Brazil
*
*Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

Since the 1950s the spatiality of sound has become a key concept in different fields of artistic practice, emerging as one of the most relevant subjects in the contemporary arts. Ideas related to sound and space have been used in different discourses and practices to refer to or to explore perceptually different facets of the spatiality of sound. In the field of fine art they have been associated with the emergence of sound art, while in music, they have been associated with spatial music. In spite of this widespread interest in sound and space, the uses of spatial concepts in relation to sound and music have been inconsistent, with different authors and practitioners referring to different aspects of the complex relationship between the two. In this article I suggest a typology with five categories to describe five meanings of space I identified in the recent literature of music and sound art: metaphor, acoustic space, sound spatialisation, reference and location. With this typology I expect to clarify the contemporary uses of space and spatial concepts in music and sound art.

Type
Articles
Information
Organised Sound , Volume 20 , Special Issue 2: Sound Art and Music, Historical Continuum and Mimetic Fissures , August 2015 , pp. 241 - 248
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2015 

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Footnotes

*

This article represents partial results of PhD work funded by ORSAS Award, Peel Studentship and Lancaster University.

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