Creative Tech Week

We will describe and discuss our method of mining a sonic environment for its narrative potential, which employs spatialization as a compositional tool by moving sound across a multi-channel system. Sound and music evoke thoughts and emotions that the mind automatically crafts into human narratives. Our compositions weave sonic minimalism, repetition, musical ostinato and drones into contemplative environments that relieve the anxiety of expectations in performance; we create a sense of stasis, undermining the propensity for audiences to wonder ‘what comes next'. We create associative content–familiar but unidentifiable–that provides a framework that seeds the imagination, helping to locate listeners without dictating meaning. Our soundscores stimulate elusive narratives without defining any one; audiences fill in stories of their own devising. Our works interact with room acoustics by experimenting with ways to move ‘walls' of sound within the physical walls of a given space, examining ways that human hearing affects our perception of both environmental and cultural locale. The conversation between sonic content and its placement in space has become integral to our storytelling. We will next explore how listener attention changes with the introduction of a performer, how sonic elements function within discreet geometric zones, how those zones might affect potential integrations and relationships between listeners, and how the use of headphones brings a sense of privacy to human behavior in public settings.