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Mike Holderness wrote: That said, the use of actuators on curtains seems a better idea than, say, the arrays of speakers used in correcting concert-hall acoustics. And the availability of cheap, very very fast digital signal processing opens all sorts of possiblities, as soon as someone works out interfaces that allow performer/composers to explore them. Drew replies: People like Arup Acoustics install active walls and ceilings in venues involving both variable acoustic treatment and variable absorption systems such that the sound is controlled as part of the building. Aside from the irony that 'natural' events should need artificial enhancement, it is surely more interesting to explore the sonic effects in their own right rather than try to make them fit a nineteenth century ideal of perfection. The kinds of things that Arup do - interesting though they are - are in any case horrendously expensive, and I look forward to people designing the interfaces you mention so that toying around in this area can become a real possibility for artists (and not have to be the preserve of the few). Mike Holderness wrote: To illustrate the problem: what I'm thinking about at the moment is the ability to "remove" a sound from one point in space and redistibute it, arbitrarily altered, to other points. But this is: (a) a hard programming task; and (b) probably a physics-centered rather than a musical idea anyway. Drew replies: If a sound is "removed", altered, and displaced, it could then be recontextualised in interesting ways. Perhaps you could have, say, four amplification and cancellation systems in different rooms or corners of a room which can each process sound in different ways. The sounds "removed" would be "replaced" by those taken and processed in other parts of the space, so that as the process is repeated and the sounds are relayed between the different sites the mutations they undergo would reflect their passage between and through the different spaces. You might imagine emitting a simple tone in such a space which is processed and displaced before becoming the source material for the subsequent transformations, the result being either a profusion of sounds or timbral effects of layering. The ways the sounds are processed by each system might be controlled by a performer in response to the sounds which are generated, or they might be kept constant so that the listener can trace the path they have taken and so the sonic geography of the space. I don't know if this is quite what you had in mind, and it would not be an easy matter to do it in this way. One might explore less ambitious scenarios, but for me the bottom line is that the listeners feel that they are in the middle of an unfolding event, rather than just watching it on a screen (so to speak) - and designing an environment which they can explore seems to me to be one of the best ways of achieving this. As for whether it counts as 'music', I think it is healthy to pursue such questions - even if Beethoven might not have approved.