« Rencontres Acousmatiques 2025 »
4 & 5 juillet @ CRANE lab https://linktr.ee/cranelab
« Variation as Volume »
Composing the space is not a modern approach for musicians. From the late-Renaissance Venetian polyphonic school at St. Mark's Basilica, to Stockhausen's division of sound-groups in his three-orchestra piece Gruppen, to multichannel sound systems, which today “potentially” give the possibility of exploiting higher orders of polyphonic compositions.
I would like to introduce one possibility of working with multi-channel constellations to build deep sonic volumetric structures : Building volumetric depth into the performance space by introducing different variations in the parameters of sound in each channel. The simultaneity of a sonic gesture with its own variations in terms of sonority (notion of harmony), time (notion of polyphony), intensity (notion of depth), or all at the same time !
This idea was partly inspired by the practice of heterophony, which involves embellishing the same “musical playing” to generate different manifestations of the same playing, happening at the same time in different voices. Heterophony, which was mostly considered an ornamentation in many non-Western musical cultures, allows for the creation of multi-dimensional, complex “monophonic” sound. This, of course, implies crafting each voice/channel separately and manually.