The emotional contents of the ‘space’ in spatial music
Conference item
Authors | Lennox, Peter |
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Abstract | Human spatial perception is how we understand places. Beyond understanding what is where (William James’ formulation of the psychological approach to perception); there are holistic qualities to places. We perceive places as busy, crowded, exciting, threatening or peaceful, calm, comfortable and so on. Designers of places spend a great deal of time and effort on these qualities; scientists rarely do. In the scientific world-view physical qualities and our emotive responses to them are neatly divided in the objective-subjective dichotomy. In this context, music has traditionally constituted an item in a place. Over the last two decades, development of “spatial music” has been within the prevailing engineering paradigm, informed by psychophysical data; here, space is an abstract, Euclidean 3-dimensional ‘container’ for events. The emotional consequence of spatial arrangements is not the main focus in this approach. This paper argues that a paradigm shift is appropriate, from ‘music-in-a-place’ to ‘music-as-a-place’ requiring a fundamental philosophical realignment of ‘meaning’ away from subjective response to include consequences-in-the-environment. Hence the hegemony of the subjective-objective dichotomy is questioned. There are precedents for this, for example in the ecological approach to perception (Gibson). An ecological approach to music-as-environment intrinsically treats the emotional consequences of spatio-musical arrangement holistically. A simplified taxonomy of the attributes of artificial spatial sound in this context will be discussed. |
Human spatial perception is how we understand places. Beyond understanding what is where (William James’ formulation of the psychological approach to perception); there are holistic qualities to places. We perceive places as busy, crowded, exciting, threatening or peaceful, calm, comfortable and so on. Designers of places spend a great deal of time and effort on these qualities; scientists rarely do. In the scientific world-view physical qualities and our emotive responses to them are neatly divided in the objective-subjective dichotomy. | |
Keywords | Spatial composition; Spatial audition; Spatial music; Emotion |
Year | 2009 |
Publisher | International Conference on Music and Emotion, Durham, UK |
Web address (URL) | http://hdl.handle.net/10545/347428 |
hdl:10545/347428 | |
File | File Access Level Open |
File | File Access Level Open |
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Publication dates | Sep 2009 |
Publication process dates | |
Deposited | 01 Apr 2015, 14:00 |
Contributors | University of Derby |
https://repository.derby.ac.uk/item/94175/the-emotional-contents-of-the-space-in-spatial-music
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