ï~~Proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference 2011, University of Huddersfield, UK, 31 July - 5 August 2011
THE SPATIALISATION OF STEREOPHONY: TAKING POSITIONS IN
POST-WAR ELECTROACOUSTIC MUSIC
Patrick Valiquet
Faculty of Music
University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom
patrick.valiquet@music.ox.ac.uk
ABSTRACT
While a growing number of musicological studies attest to
the aesthetic importance of spatialisation in electroacoustic music, few have questioned the notion that its aesthetic
significance should be reducible to its role in sonic structure. Tracing a path across the tightly knit network of
commercial, institutional, technical, and musical players
involved in the early development of spatialisation techniques, this paper undermines the presumption of formal
autonomy by sketching a history of some of the social and
discursive strategies that composers have deployed to distinguish the concept of spatialisation from preexisting and
parallel concepts of multichannel stereophony. The paper
closes with some reflections on the role of spatialisation
in the development of electroacoustic music as a genre.
1. INTRODUCTION
Multiple-speaker projection techniques, spatial simulation
methods, site-specific and purpose-built architectural installations are among electroacoustic music's defining concerns. While these techniques have been the object of a
variety of attempts at formalisation in Western Art Music
since the end of the Second World War, nowhere has spatialisation played such an integral role in common practice
as in electroacoustic and computer music. The majority
of the existing musicological treatments of spatialisation,
however, have tended to presume that spatialisation methods should be treated solely in terms of their coherence as
a component of sonic structure. [31, 45, 58] The historical
study which I gloss in this paper troubles the presumption
of structural autonomy which has prevailed in the musicological literature on electroacoustic and computer music
by tracing a path through the discursive, social, and technical work involved in the process by which multichannel
spatialisation became a concern in post-war studios. It
was through this work that composers and theorists were
able to rationalise their appropriation of the technical apparatus of multichannel stereophony from the telecommunications and entertainment industries while simultaneously constructing an aesthetic of spatialisation which
delegitimised commercial music and sound design.
As I will show in this paper, the discourse used to
sever connections between spatialisation and the technical
apparatus of stereophonic broadcasting and recording did
not spring forth whole, but had to be developed over time.
Contemporary use of the word stereophony as a technical term, which only began to normalise after two-channel
playback equipment became available on the home market
in the late 1950s, is markedly different from the use which
was current during the early years of electroacoustic music. In contemporary discourse, the term spatialisation
is used to refer to a family of techniques for organising
and manipulating the location, movement, and propagation of sound within a listening environment. Use of the
word in English can be traced back to its French cognate,
which occupied a key position in the technical lexicon of
musique concrdte in the early 1950s. [54] At the time
of the adoption of multichannel stereophony in the early
electroacoustic studios a wide variety of competing techniques had been available, some since the early 1930s. As
late as 1960, the concept of stereophony was still inclusive
enough to encompass any method of sound reproduction
involving more than one speaker.' [64] The main difference between the contemporary and the post-war concepts
of stereophony is that, in the latter, the potential number
and positioning of loudspeakers was effectively unlimited.
Following the gradual change in usage reveals that the
deep integration of multichannel spatialisation techniques
into electroacoustic concert practice, which preceded the
establishment of formal compositional methodologies using standardised recording and playback formats, did not
mean that these technologies were ever the exclusive domain of electroacoustic composers. In fact, the historical
sources cited in this paper call into question the notion
that the technologies of spatialisation were ever driven by
purely compositional conceptions. Instead, the evidence
suggests that electroacoustic composers worked as members of a close-knit network of technicians, theorists, and
institutions in which multichannel sound projection was
already a concern, developed independently from any notions of musical necessity. Although it is impossible to
disentangle the extent to which a change in the use of technical language is the result of industrial standardisation
or the work of avant-garde musicians, filling out our account of this shift in uses does cast significant doubt upon
SThe writers and editors of Die Reihe used the German equivalent in
this sense [24, 14, 60], and their counterparts in Paris used the French
equivalent in the same way. [54, 47] Stockhausen, for one, would continue to use the term with this broader connotation until much later in
his career. [62]
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