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Artistic Practice

The rest of this documentation explains how spatial audio works — the psychoacoustics, the techniques, the acoustics of rooms, the calibration of systems. This part asks a different question, the one that comes first for anyone actually making a piece: what do you want space to do?

Space is not the finish you apply to a sound once it is composed. It is a material you compose with — as available to intention as pitch, rhythm, timbre or dynamics. A sound placed at a distance, a gesture that sweeps around the room, a texture that dissolves into an enveloping haze, a voice that seems to stand physically among the listeners: these are not effects added at the end. They are musical and dramaturgical decisions, and they are most powerful when they are taken early, as part of the idea, not retrofitted onto a stereo mix in the last hour before a show.

This part is written for the people who take those decisions: composers, electroacoustic and acousmatic artists, electronic musicians, sound designers, theatre and performance makers, installation artists. It assumes no engineering background. Where a technical idea matters — wavefield synthesis, ambisonics, the direct-to-reverberant ratio — we point to the chapter that explains it, but you never need to read that chapter first to follow the argument here.

What this part is for​

Two questions run through everything that follows, and they map onto the first two chapters:

  1. How do you think about sonic space — on a stage, and in a real venue — as compositional material? Where do sounds live, how big are they, do they move, how many can a listener actually follow at once, and how does the imagined space of the work meet the real space of the room?
  2. How do you diffuse that idea to an audience? What logic of spatialisation serves your intention — a single sweet spot or a fidelity spread across the whole room, a precise point-source or an enveloping field, a fixed design or a live gesture — and how does the geometry of the audience constrain it?

The third chapter takes these two frameworks and shows how they play out practice by practice, because the answers differ sharply between an acousmatic concert, a club night, a staged performance with visible musicians, and a theatre production.

The parts​

Thinking the Sound Space​

Space as a compositional parameter. The two spaces every piece negotiates — the one it imagines and the one it is played in. Mapping a scene: fixed and moving sources, foreground and background, how much simultaneous spatial detail a listener can hold, gesture and trajectory as phrase. Reading a venue as an instrument, and reverberation as material.

Diffusion Logics for the Audience​

From the idea to the room full of people. The central trade-off between a single ideal listening point and a fidelity distributed across the whole audience. A decision grid of diffusion logics — frontal, point-source, field, diffuse — and the audience geometries that push you toward each. Diffusion as a live, interpretive gesture, from the 1951 pupitre d'espace to today's tablet control.

Practice by Practice​

Four self-contained chapters, one per domain, mirroring the Workflows part on the technical side:

The applied companion to this part is the Case Studies: the same thinking taken into concrete jobs — an immersive album, a concert, a play, a keynote, a diffusion evening, a gallery installation — each read as a brief, its creative and technical decisions, and the solutions available, generically and with RIPL.

→ Begin: Thinking the Sound Space