The emotional contents of the ‘space’ in spatial music
dc.contributor.author | Lennox, Peter | |
dc.date.accessioned | 2015-04-01T14:00:46Z | en |
dc.date.available | 2015-04-01T14:00:46Z | en |
dc.date.issued | 2009-09 | en |
dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/10545/347428 | en |
dc.description.abstract | Human spatial perception is how we understand places. Beyond understanding what is where (William James’ formulation of the psychological approach to perception); there are holistic qualities to places. We perceive places as busy, crowded, exciting, threatening or peaceful, calm, comfortable and so on. Designers of places spend a great deal of time and effort on these qualities; scientists rarely do. In the scientific world-view physical qualities and our emotive responses to them are neatly divided in the objective-subjective dichotomy. In this context, music has traditionally constituted an item in a place. Over the last two decades, development of “spatial music” has been within the prevailing engineering paradigm, informed by psychophysical data; here, space is an abstract, Euclidean 3-dimensional ‘container’ for events. The emotional consequence of spatial arrangements is not the main focus in this approach. This paper argues that a paradigm shift is appropriate, from ‘music-in-a-place’ to ‘music-as-a-place’ requiring a fundamental philosophical realignment of ‘meaning’ away from subjective response to include consequences-in-the-environment. Hence the hegemony of the subjective-objective dichotomy is questioned. There are precedents for this, for example in the ecological approach to perception (Gibson). An ecological approach to music-as-environment intrinsically treats the emotional consequences of spatio-musical arrangement holistically. A simplified taxonomy of the attributes of artificial spatial sound in this context will be discussed. | |
dc.language.iso | en | en |
dc.publisher | International Conference on Music and Emotion, Durham, UK | en |
dc.relation.url | http://vbn.aau.dk/files/42987437/music_and_emotion.2009.prog.pdf | en |
dc.relation.url | https://derby.academia.edu/peterlennox/Papers | en |
dc.relation.url | https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Peter_Lennox/contributions | en |
dc.subject | Spatial composition | en |
dc.subject | Spatial audition | en |
dc.subject | Spatial music | en |
dc.subject | Emotion | en |
dc.title | The emotional contents of the ‘space’ in spatial music | en |
dc.type | Meetings and Proceedings | en |
dc.contributor.department | University of Derby | en |
refterms.dateFOA | 2019-02-28T13:40:52Z | |
html.description.abstract | Human spatial perception is how we understand places. Beyond understanding what is where (William James’ formulation of the psychological approach to perception); there are holistic qualities to places. We perceive places as busy, crowded, exciting, threatening or peaceful, calm, comfortable and so on. Designers of places spend a great deal of time and effort on these qualities; scientists rarely do. In the scientific world-view physical qualities and our emotive responses to them are neatly divided in the objective-subjective dichotomy. In this context, music has traditionally constituted an item in a place. Over the last two decades, development of “spatial music” has been within the prevailing engineering paradigm, informed by psychophysical data; here, space is an abstract, Euclidean 3-dimensional ‘container’ for events. The emotional consequence of spatial arrangements is not the main focus in this approach. This paper argues that a paradigm shift is appropriate, from ‘music-in-a-place’ to ‘music-as-a-place’ requiring a fundamental philosophical realignment of ‘meaning’ away from subjective response to include consequences-in-the-environment. Hence the hegemony of the subjective-objective dichotomy is questioned. There are precedents for this, for example in the ecological approach to perception (Gibson). An ecological approach to music-as-environment intrinsically treats the emotional consequences of spatio-musical arrangement holistically. A simplified taxonomy of the attributes of artificial spatial sound in this context will be discussed. |