https://doi.org/10.1080/09298215.2019.1703013
...artistic research ... 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.
A 3D environment and the sound-generating object it contains can thus be seen either as an instrument or a musical score ... (in the sense of a legible record and temporal organisation of musical events).
While there are a number of different sonic scenarios in the "Kilgore" piece, movements of the avatars always produce continuous sounds when moving in the horizontal plane and percussive sounds when jumping.
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.
By contrast, the fact that a 3D environment can also be understood as a score may appear less self-evident. I would this like to explain my thoughts on this by way of aconcreteexample. When designing Kilgore’s 3D environment, I spent some time smoothing bumpy sections of the paths and ravines along which the avatars usually move, as otherwise the avatars would frequently get stuck behind these uneven patches and need to perform a jump to continue on their path, interrupting the flow of movement. Initially, I sought to avoid the gaps produced by uneven sections. When rehearsing Kilgore, however, the following unexpected scenario occurred: at a certain point in the piece, one of the avatars has to move to a position that can only be reached by running through a long ravine. Furthermore, at this point in the piece a functionality is activated that causes objects to fall from the sky when the jump function is used. These objects produce feedback-like sounds when they land. During the rehearsals it became clear that I had not made this ravine smooth enough, which made the avatars get stuck and meant that they could only move forward by jumping. This triggered a large number of the falling objects and their feedback effects. What had initially been an oversight in developing the 3D landscape unexpectedly gave this particular part of the piece a special character of its own. There was no other part of the composition in which the mentioned feedback-producing objects were triggered so frequently. In this particular context, this design ‘flaw’ provided musical interest and became characteristic of the piece’s formal structure.