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What is particularly interesting to me, as an engineer who has worked for (far too) many years developing equipment for composers and musicians, aprticularly to do with the use of Ambisonic technology for 3-D sound and who is now (very tentativly) starting down the composition route himself, is the great upsurge in the use of space (meaning acoustic space) as a fundamental part of musical compositions, not just an incidental consequence of the performance venue. Of course, this is not new - one can go back to Tallis in the 16th century, Ives in the 19/20th, Varesee, Schaeffer, Brandt, Stockhausen, Rolf himself and many others - but as Rolf says in connection with his work, technology has changed things, The emergence of fast cheap computers with multi-channel outputs has given all of us the opportunity to work with sound in space. No longer do you have to have large, expensive setups like GRM's Acousmonium or the Beast ensemble - just a computer, which as an electroacoustic or techno musician you will almost certainly posess already, a multichannel soundcard such as the MaxiStudio, and sound speakers/amps. If you work in small venues, you don't even need to have anything special in the way of speakers if you know them well enough, as our local group of ea composers, Nerve-8, has shown. When they do a gig, each member of the group turns up with their hi-fi from home and they build a rig from them! This has opened up a whole new field of musical exploration and we need to develop language(s) and aesthetic(s) appropriate to it. For instance, music is usually regarded as a temporal phenomenon (sounds organised in the time dimension) but as space and time are now regarded as interchangeable/interlocked dimensions, can music exist spatially (sounds organised in space) with time no longer an (important) parameter? Dave /**************************************************************************/ /* Dave Malham "http://www.york.ac.uk/depts/music/dgm.htm" */ /* Music Technology Group "http://www.york.ac.uk/inst/mustech/welcome.htm"*/ /* Department of Music "http://www.york.ac.uk/depts/music/welcome.htm" */ /* The University of York Phone 01904 432448 */ /* Heslington Fax 01904 432450 */ /* York YO1 5DD */ /* UK 'Ambisonics - Component Imaging for Audio' */ /* "http://www.york.ac.uk/inst/mustech/3d_audio/ambison.htm" */ /**************************************************************************/