professor nikos stavropoulos

My latest work, Khemenu, is a Higher Order Ambisonic composition for fixed media.  

 

The name of the work, Khemenu, is derived from Egyptian mythology and refers to The Ogdoad, a group of eight primordial deities worshipped in ancient Egypt. The group consisted of four male and female couples who are symbolising the balance between the primary elements of the cosmos. The notion of the Ogdoad (group of eight) is also found in early gnostic belief systems and ancient astronomy and cosmology (eight celestial bodies), as well as Chinese mythology (eight immortals). Eight is also the number of channels in a 2nd order Ambisonic recording (A Format), the technique used to capture the raw materials for the work.  

Khemenu is part of a series of works which explore the notion of aural microspace - an area of acoustic space, which cannot be inhabited due to physical constraints, and whose aural architecture is only accessible when mediated by recording technology. In this case, sound materials for the work were recorded exclusively with a 2nd order ambisonic microphone in an effort to capture and work with three-dimensional spatial detail at source. These recordings were processed using tools which catered for multichannel sources in order to embed the characteristics of the sources’s aural architecture in the development of new materials. This is not to say that the acoustic space captured in the recordings is retained in the processed sounds materials, but rather that it permeates, it informs the aural architecture of the resulting materials once the original has gone through processing. 

The work has recently been awarded the first prize at the International Sonosfera Ambisonics Competition in Italy. I will be travelling in Itally next month for the award ceremony and to present the work using the Sonosfera system in a concert on the 9th of June.  

https://isac-pesaro.github.io/ 

A stereo reduction of the work is available here.



 

The Sonosfera periphonic sound system.  

 

Sonosfera® is a mobile technological amphitheater for deep listening of ecosystems and music, designed for Pesaro UNESCO City of Music by David Monacchi, opened to the public in Dec 2019. It is equipped with an array of custom-built loudspeakers isotropically positioned in a spherical space (with the only exception of the nadir area) within perfect internal acoustics. Sound-transparent circular terraces lift the audience above an acoustically ‘active’ lower hemisphere, while the upper one is also equipped with a 360° projection screen with horizontal resolution of 24k. Sonosfera® puts listeners at the center of soundscape, in the darkness of a stimulating acousmatic sensorial experience, sometimes “lighted up” by visual analyses of sound. Sonosfera® was originally designed and built for spherical reconstruction of HOA field recordings carried out in primary tropical rainforest ecosystems, as part of the scope of the long-term project Fragments of Extinction. But Sonosfera® is of course capable of reproducing any 3D-soundfield with extreme accuracy and spatial resolution, including new creations of electroacoustic, soundscape, and integrated audio-visual compositions. For this reason, ISAC-2023 represents the first occasion to use this perfect 3D-sound instrument and venue, within a framework of contemporary research in music and sound/visual creation. 

Over the last few years I have been working with the notion of aural microspace and uniting spectromorphology and spatiomorphology in the acousmatic composition workflow. I capture and work with the spatiality of sound materials as much detail as possible at the beginning of the process and work with found acoustic space.  

A new project in collaboration with partners from the UK and beyond, which will be the first truly comprehensive study of fixed-medium spatial music practice over the last half century, considering tools and technologies, music theory and analysis, and creative compositional practice in a holistic way.  

Echo’s Chambers - Architecture and the Idea of Acoustic Space 

By Joseph L. Clarke 

 

Echo’s Chambers explores how architectural experimentation from the seventeenth through the mid-twentieth centuries laid the groundwork for concepts of acoustic space that are widely embraced in contemporary culture. It focuses on the role of echo and reverberation in the architecture of Pierre Patte, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, Carl Ferdinand Langhans, and Le Corbusier, as well as the influential acoustic ideas of Athanasius Kircher, Richard Wagner, and Marshall McLuhan. Drawing on interdisciplinary theories of media and auditory culture, Joseph L. Clarke reveals how architecture has impacted the ways we continue to listen to, talk about, and creatively manipulate sound in the physical environment.