Voicing Spatial Songs

Spatial audio is a way of creating sound in 360 degrees around a listener. The terminology spatial audio in this text covers : immersive audio, 3D sound, ambisonics, surround-sound, multi-channel, immersive music-distribution: dolby atmos and binaural.

Since recording technologies became available for wider use approximately 100 years ago, music has for most part been ‘frozen’ in one or two dimensions (mono / stereo). But recent technological advances have now allowed for immersive music to be distributed to a wider audience, e.g Apple Music's spatial audio format that launched in June 2021. But for the most part it is not the artists themselves that are working on those spatial audio mixes. 

New audio formats that we’re exposed to from a commercial angle, as well as the production tools available to us as musicians and composers, will without a doubt inform and shape the music we as artists can imagine and hence create. Experiments with spatializing sound have historically required very specialized knowledge in terms of software programming, and access to spatial speaker setups have been limited to a handful of exclusive state-of-the-art venues around the world. But efforts have been made in recent years to democratize tools and software that allow creators to more easily stage and sculpt audio in virtual and real sonic spaces, while spatial audio venues and workstations are rapidly becoming more accessible. Spatial audio and its technologies is still a very new frontier with yet-to-be explored artistic potentialities.

In the KUV project Voicing Spatial Songs, avant-pop duo SØSTR consisting of Sharin and Louise Foo take up the challenge posed by these new spatial audio technologies, to produce, create and develop new music and methods for working in this medium. Seeking to gain artistic, technological and methodic experience and advancements that can facilitate broader access and more inclusion into such technologies as spatial audio is emerging into mainstream. 

And spatialization in music has particularly played a role in electro-acoustic, avant-garde and sound art traditions, but SØSTR are finding that there’s yet to be explored artistic potential with spatialization in popular music, both in a creation and in a performance aspect which finds itself still ‘frozen’ in two dimensions, still very stereo-centric. How will adding more dimensions and disrupting the stereo perspective, change our artistic process, experience and output? 

This project was continued and can be followed here: Voicing Spatial Songs 2.0 | Rhythmic Music Conservatory (rmc.dk)