Island Eye Island Ear

For more than ten years since 1974, Tudor collaborated with Fujiko Nakaya and Jackie Monnier on a grand-scale project to convert an entire island into a musical instrument. His plan was to play back recordings of sounds recorded at various locations on an island via parabolic antenna loudspeakers installed throughout the same island, which created sound beams modulated by wind that visitors would hear only when they crossed paths with them. Although Tudor spoke of the aim of Island Eye Island Ear as an attempt to examine the maximum scale of feedback, neither electronic nor acoustic feedback appears in the plan. This puzzle can only be solved by accounting for the experience of the visitors who walk around the island-instrument hearing one sound and reflecting on another heard before, something Tudor was exploring in other works from the same period such as Rainforest. The fact that the island project was met by criticisms of environmental destruction and remained unfinished points to the idiosyncratic nature of Tudor’s conception of “nature” derived from the teachings of Rudolf Steiner, and hints at the possible limit of his conceptual and physical enhancement of what musical instruments can be.

Design, Control, and Evaluation of Mixed-Order, Compact Spherical Loudspeaker Arrays

Beamforming on the icosahedral loudspeaker (IKO), a compact, spherical loudspeaker array, was recently established and investigated as an instrument to produce auditory sculptures (i.e., 3-D sonic imagery) in electroacoustic music. Sound beams in the horizontal plane most effectively and expressively produce auditory objects via lateral reflections on sufficiently close walls and baffles. Can there be 3-D-printable arrays at drastically reduced cost and transducer count, but with similarly strong directivity in the horizontal plane? To find out, we adopt mixed-order Ambisonics schemes to control fewer, and predominantly horizontal, beam patterns, and we propose the 3|9|3 array as a suitable design, with beamforming crossing over to Ambisonics panning at high frequencies. Analytic models and measurements on hardware prototypes permit a comparison between the new design and the IKO regarding beamforming capacity. Moreover, we evaluate our 15-channel 3|9|3 prototype in listening experiments to find out whether the sculptural qualities and auditory object trajectories it produces are comparable to those of the 20-channel IKO.

Perception of Spatial Sound Phenomena Created by the Icosahedral Loudspeaker

The icosahedral loudspeaker (IKO) is able to project strongly focused sound beams into arbitrary directions. Incorporating artistic experience and psychoacoustic research, this article presents three listening experiments that provide evidence for a common, intersubjective perception of spatial sonic phenomena created by the IKO. The experiments are designed on the basis of a hierarchical model of spatiosonic phenomena that exhibit increasing complexity, ranging from a single static sonic object to combinations of multiple, partly moving objects. The results are promising and explore new compositional perspectives in spatial computer music.