Some Aesthetic Questions

Issues of Scale

How long is too long? How short is too short? Too high? Too low? Too loud? Too soft? The normal concert constraints are gone, and it is easy to imagine pieces that run for multiple hours, with improbable spectra and amplitudes, all of which invoke strong emotional responses (some, of course, averse). At present I find a comfortable length to be somewhat less than an hour. Due to the private and intimate nature of loudspeaker listening, “ambient” textures that evolve over tens of minutes seem entirely reasonable for comfortable listening. Further, dynamic ranges can range from almost as loud as a symphony orchestra (ca. 120 dBC SPL) to much, much softer than an orchestra can play. One wonderful and idiomatic loudspeaker gesture is the slow fade that finally merges with room noise and then fades from sensory awareness as it continues to fade out below room noise. This may take five to ten minutes, and it is quite mesmerizing for listeners.

Relation to traditional performance

This sort of idiomatic loudspeaker music has little relation to the kind of ceremonial tension inherent in live performance. The lack of psychological interaction between performer and listener adds to the cool affect of loudspeaker music. Loudspeaker music seems much more suited to be “organic,” “mechanical,” “related to nature,” “patterned” and “intimate,” as well as “cosmic,” “alien” and “otherworldly.” It does not stand in well for the emotional intensity from a passionate live performance. It is, on almost all fronts, an extremely different sort of artistic experience.

The Failure of the Willing Suspension of Disbelief

One irony of this music is that it suffers badly when played back over poor systems (which, sadly, has been the fate of virtually all electronic music distributed via records and CDs). We use the willing suspension of disbelief to permit ourselves to invest in the musical quality and intensity of recordings of traditional performances. That suspension allows us to forgive a lot, much more than we usually recognize.

Pure electronic loudspeaker music does not refer to traditional performance, and therefore, ubfortunately, there is no disbelief to suspend. As a result, our perception is much more literal, and sonic failures are perceived as performance and/or compositional defects. This is particularly true in terms of distortion components and the loss of multichannel low frequencies (particularly when low frequency content is summed to a single subwoofer, which destroys a great deal of envelopment).

The implication of this is quite important for such music. It means that the music cannot reasonably be distributed via stereo or multi-channel CD to any playback system, but is in fact dependent almost entirely on the quality and integrity of the loudspeaker system and its installation. Transcription to lesser systems doesn’t work. This truly is “Music for An Array of Very Good Loudspeakers.” This may in fact be true for almost all electronic music.

The Meaning of Reverberance

Reverberance appears to have great emotional relevance for us. In spite of the fact that it appears to be contrary to survival (because it masks objects in the environments), our response to it is anything but aversive. And this is a place where the sort of loudspeaker array that I have created is powerfully effective beyond any normal acoustical counterpart, including reverberant cathedrals and the like.

The sensation of surround reverberant wash (especially when a height channel is included) appears to be extremely pleasurable, especially for musicians. The ability to generate such reverberance, at will, and in parallel with non-reverberant sounds as desired, gives composers an extraordinarily powerful tool for the generation of loudspeaker music.

Interestingly, here is a case where the evocation of a specific sonic environment (a specific church or concert hall, for instance) is essentially irrelevant. The reverberances I use have no physical counterpart – the key issues pertaining to their use appear to be decay time (from 1 second to 10 minutes), spectrum (where emphasis is placed in the decaying frequency bands) and specific pitches that may be present (as a function of the usually inaudible source that was used to generate the reverberance).

Limits of Comfort and Safety

Because of excellent loudspeakers’ ability to exceed the window of comfortable listening levels on a sustained level, it is incumbent upon the composer/producer to ensure that the exposure levels do not abuse the listeners. As a general guide, based on a lot of measurements, I suggest an Lmax of 112 dBC SPL in the listening area and an Leq for any given work not to exceed 100 dBC SPL.

Because composers do not usually have much training in either acoustics or noise measurements, they have a tendency to be careless about this. The result can be quite unpleasant, not to mention painful and possibly injurious. In my case and in response to these concerns, I very carefully document levels during production and match them quite precisely (+/- 1 dB) in performance playback. Even so, some people find levels uncomfortable.

Possible Venues

To maintain specified Sound Pressure Levels while using speakers with the quality of BeoLab 5s, it is important to limit the volume of playback venues. I suggest a volume maximum of approximate 60,000 cubic feet. Further, it is highly desirable for such venues to have limited natural reverberance (< 1.2 secs.?). For the record, my studio has a volume of 8000 cubic feet and a broadband decay time of .5 seconds.

Such music, therefore, cannot go into concert halls or other normal performance venues. It is suitable for home listening (once the overhead speaker is dealt with) and small galleries and museum spaces, to the extent that they are otherwise suitable.

As a result, such music is not going to have a wide audience or exposure. My experience has been, however, that the music is of sufficient power that listeners often seek repeat hearings. It is my hope that I can manage to expand the audience and hearing opportunities for this particular genre over the next decade. I believe the music has real power and validity, and may be of considerable historical performance.