Creating A Loudspeaker Array

The loudspeaker array I have created is based on some commercial antecedents. I earn much of my living producing and mastering commercial recordings for others, as well as teaching and writing about it, and so I need and use such commercial arrays on a daily basis.

Precedents:

When I first began to work with synthesizers (ca. 1968), I had no knowledge or experience regarding the historical traditions underlying loudspeaker music or any knowledge of the craft of making recordings. I began with stereo because that was what was available. I soon began to work with a 4-track recorder and almost immediately went to a quadraphonic array. At the same time, I began recording others professionally, and devoted a good deal of my efforts to developing my craft to serve them. I had no quadraphonic clients, so whatever work I did in quadraphony was entirely for my own experimentation and interest.

I quickly discovered that I could, both by accident and intentionally, generate surprisingly beautiful sounds and sensory environments using a quadraphonic array, sounds that I could not begin to approach in stereo.

At the same time, I began to notice that the quality of loudspeaker performance was directly related to the quality of loudspeakers. Further, I noticed that I did not have the technical capacity to realize and control the musical compositional processes that I desired to work with.

For a significant period of time (ca. 1975 to 2000) I devoted myself to research and development of loudspeakers as an essential part of developing my craft as a composer, while also waiting for the technical capability that I felt I needed to become available and affordable.

The Five-Channel Array

In the mid 1990s, I built a post-production studio for my own use in my home that was to be used for both commercial work in stereo and also for my own surround recording. By that time, a 5-channel home theatre playback modality was in place that I believed I could use viably for my compositional efforts. I hoped that such a configuration would give me a release and distribution medium for my music.

A Sixth Channel: The Need for Verticality

During a visit to Paris in 1995, I was strongly affected by the vertical sensory quality of many of Claude Monet’s large Water Lily paintings on exhibition at the Musee Marmottan. It seemed to me that it might be very important to invoke the sense of verticality I was so moved by in those paintings.

Consequently, in June, 1995, I installed a full range ceiling speaker in my studio to go with my five-channel horizontal array. Although I was prepared for this to be a wasted effort, I was pleased to find that it yielded some wonderful ambiences. At the same time, I discovered several recording engineers that were capturing vertical information as part of surround recordings that they were making. When I auditioned their work I became convinced that the vertical channel was an extremely important ingredient in creating a viable multichannel sound field.

At that time, I fixed my loudspeaker array to include five horizontal and one vertical channel, all full-range and all using wide-dispersing high-frequency acoustic lenses that I shared in inventing.[3] For commercial viability, I fixed my surround array to have speakers at 0°, 35°, 135°, 225° and 325°, plus the overhead speaker at approximately the same distance (9’) and approximately 15° forward of vertical.

Since that time, I have also experimented with having the horizontal array as a pentagon (0°, 72°, 144°, 216° and 288°) and find that it is generally preferable (it also works wonderfully for 3-channel stereo!). However, due to my commercial work, I have retained the conventional alignment. It is my plan to use the pentagon for any gallery presentations.