https://doi.org/10.1080/09298215.2019.1703013
...artistic research, which implies that knowledge and understanding is primarily gathered through artistic practice (Lüneburg, 2018).
Usually, the concept of ‘composing with space’ is understood as the purposeful positioning or movement of a sound event in a plane or three-dimensional space. My reflections are also concerned with the distribution of sound events in space, but here one important feature is that this spatial configuration can be experienced in a virtual space through performers’ movements.
If we want to enable the performers to experience virtuality as a place into which they are intensely embedded, it is important to design its digital realisation – also referred to as perceptually seductive technology (Waterworth, 2001)–in a way that enables the experience of presence. Parallels to the experience of the real world form the starting point for this.
It has been known for some time that it is possible for virtual reality to achieve a kind of ‘sensory rearrangement’ resulting in modified experiences of one’s own body’ (Waterworth & Waterworth, 2014, p. 595). This is also referred to as ‘maximal binding’, ‘[which] implies that in cyberspace anything can be combined with anything and made to “adhere”’ (Novack, 1992). This is highly interesting and has hardly been investigated in regard to musical scenarios thus far. In an experimental setup (cf. Figure 4), for example, I replaced the third of the abovementioned elementary points, the filtering of sound when turning away, with a manipulation of pitch. This means that in this particular case, all sound sources located behind the avatar were transposed. As the sound sources in this model produced static pitches, rotating around one’s own axis in the virtual space resulted in a variation of the harmonic situation.
"virtually embodied steering of parameters"
When a 3D environment is designed with the aim of offering a certain arrangement of possible sounds, this environment can thus be understood as an instrument.