Time seems to be churning and slipping like liquid lately, so I’ll try to write this as quickly as possible. Earlier this month, I wrapped up my residency* at Lobe Studio, where I spent a total of 80 hours across June and July. I went into the residency knowing a bit about 4DSOUND, the holographic sound technology that Lobe is dedicated to, having attended an info session and a performance there previously. But the experience of working independently in the space for so long was irreplaceable in terms of tuning my perception and thinking about spatial sound.
I’d never considered the difference between the experience of sound in physical reality, and the experience of sound that we as musicians and other sonic practitioners create in our recordings or in amplified live performances. We can have different experiences of a recording or live sound performance depending on the type of listening device or sound system that’s being used. But since so much of what I do is electronic and therefore mediated through amplification and digital production, I spend a lot of my time as an artist immersed in a stereo audio field (often alone in my studio or at my laptop on headphones).
One of the first things I noticed about Lobe’s system is how good it makes everything sound. Maybe that’s an exaggeration, but when a “flat” audio clip (of a foley sample, a synth patch, a drum loop, or a spoken word recording, for instance) becomes a three dimensional sound object, it takes on different qualities and becomes subject to different laws of perception. The fact that Ableton Live, a program I’ve spent a lot of time using, is used to transform the audio into sound objects, somehow underscores the alien nature of the spatial sound experience.
Live, like most DAWs, has a timeline feature for composing in linear time. I was using the timeline to create sketches of sound worlds, composing and arranging different elements to create immersive environments and suggest moments in a narrative. I collected samples and created loops, structuring sections as I would a musical track. But I found that my workflow was frequently interrupted by flashes of creative inspiration prompted by all the time I was spending in the spatial sound environment. I added many layers (and more tracks than any other project I’ve worked on, as I usually tend to be quite minimalist in that regard), and the ideas kept coming.
One of the sound shaping features of the 4DSOUND objects is a granulator, and it can be used to create spatial effects – or perhaps experiences is a better word for them – which, combined with other parameters, can turn the sound into a sort of weather system, a virtual cloud of spaces echoing through dimensions. This hyperreal sonic metaphysics can conjure a mood of intensity and transcendental poetics more often found in the poems of Blake or the writings of hermetic alchemists. It was easy to get “lost” in the spatial sound and abandon the timeline, and in my 80 hours at the studio, I only ended up composing about 8 minutes of linear time.
I could have tried for more, but my purpose was to explore shaping sound, rather than create a final product. In the coming months, I’ll be developing the sound design and soundtrack to Chthonic Trip, a supernatural-themed video game that I’m also writing and directing in collaboration with Daffodil Jenx. The spatial objects that I worked with at Lobe will influence the world of the game, and vice versa. Chthonic Trip’s (spatial) sound is linked to an emerging sense of poetics and aesthetics that I’d been developing going into the residency at Lobe, but which was expanded and enchanted by the alchemy of its machines.
As this month flows to completion, I’ll be taking flight to Montreal, where my next chapter awaits.
Til then,
xx RV
*This residency was supported by Canada Council for the Arts.