This paper introduces the Ambisonic Spatial Canvas, a practice-as-research (PaR) framework for composing spatial music directly within Higher-Order Ambisonics (HOA). Developed through an iterative programme of creative practice, critical listening and reflection, the Canvas integrates conceptual, analytical and technical approaches to the organisation of Ambisonic space.

It models a set of interrelated spatial layers, including Immediate Space, External Space and Nested Spatial Environments, and provides methods for constructing spatial form through sketching, listening and refinement.

The Canvas establishes a vocabulary for spatial texture, spatial motion trajectories and spatial gestural writing, extending existing discourses in acousmatic and electroacoustic spatial composition. By treating Ambisonic space as an active compositional material rather than a site for postproduction enhancement, the framework responds directly to contemporary discussions of making spatial audio. It contributes a reproducible, practice led method for creating coherent, expressive spatial works in HOA and offers tools for researchers and practitioners working across Ambisonic composition and spatial sound art.

In this paper, we the present the hardware and software implementation of a cost-effective wireless distributed multichannel audio system intended for immersive sound installations or performances. The system consists of a multi-device network, with each independent unit comprising a Raspberry Pi single-board computer equipped with a stereo loudspeaker and powered by a battery. The distributed architecture is managed by a central controlling computer that sends control messages via Wi-Fi to the devices that generate audio signals. Through the examination of a real-world case study involving an outdoor dance performance with spatialised sound, we address some of the design choices that were made during the development of the system. We compare our framework with other similar approaches previously reported in the literature, in terms of flexibility, maintainability, learnability, etc. In particular, we focus on the challenges related to the creative production workflow when working with a distributed audio system.

The proposed live-electronics duet, in HoA, stages a structured improvisation in which two distinct conceptions of aural spatiality are set into a productive dialogue. One performer works with multichannel recordings as repositories of found aural space—topologies captured, re-contextualised through real-time intervention—while the other constructs an embodied, choreography-inspired “dance” of point sources, articulating space through gesture-driven trajectories, displacements, and constellation. The performance unfolds as an evolving negotiation between two distinct approaches: the qualities of captured spaces, and how these imbue resulting sound materials on the one hand, and the kinetic, event-based spatial inscription of sound objects on the other. Together they generate a dynamic, co-authored spatial dramaturgy in which contrasting methods of producing, perceiving, and inhabiting sonic space reveal unexpected correspondences, tensions, and hybrid forms.

Nikos Stavropoulos studied piano, harmony and counterpoint at the National School of Music and Nakas conservatoire in Greece. In 2000 he graduated from the Music Department of the University of Wales, Bangor where he was awarded an MMus in electroacoustic composition studying with Dr Andrew Lewis. In 2005 he completed a PhD at the University of Sheffield Sound Studios with Dr Adrian Moore specializing in tape composition in stereo and multi channel formats, as well as music for video and live electronics. His work ranges from instrumental to tape and mixed media. He has composed music for video and dance and his music has been awarded mentions and prizes at international competitions. He joined the Music, Sound and Performance Group at our University in 2006 and is a founding member of the Echochroma New Music Research Group.



Otto Iivari is a Finnish electroacoustic composer and a doctoral candidate at the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre. His artistic practice centers on acousmatic, electroacoustic music, specifically composed for multichannel configurations and ambisonic systems. Iivari's work explores the expressive potential of organic sound materials, with a particular emphasis on spatialization and the dynamic movement of sound. A central theme in his creative research is the relationship between expressive human movement and the perceived motion of sound, examining their interplay as a source of artistic expression.

Otto Iivari has been awarded in several international competitions in the field of electroacoustic music, including the Student 3D Audio Competition (Europe), the International Sonosfera Ambisonic Competition, the CIME competition organized by the International Confederation of Electroacoustic Music, and the Prix Russolo. His compositions have been presented in concerts and festivals worldwide. He is currently pursuing artistic research under the supervision of Nikos Stavropoulos and Helena Tulve.

“Ich schweige, daß ich dich höre” is an acousmatic work inspired by Gottfried Benn’s poem “Meer und Wandersagen”, which frames silence as the condition for truly hearing the Other. This idea is explored through a spatial dramaturgy where sound objects, ranging from breath-like textures and AI-generated vocal fragments to granular noise and field recordings, are dynamically distributed across three-dimensional space. The composition was developed iteratively using multiple spatial formats (stereo, binaural, quadraphonic, octophonic and 5.1) and finalized in first-order Ambisonics to preserve spatial coherence across playback systems. Spatialization acts as both structural and expressive engine: chaotic, diffuse clouds of sound alternate with tightly focused trajectories, carving out moments of silence not as emptiness but as resonant voids. The listener is enveloped in a constantly shifting auditory field that mirrors the poem’s vision of space as a unifying continuum holding multiple realities. While the piece remains perceptually legible in reduced setups, its full spatial narrative unfolds in immersive 360° environments, where movement, density, and absence become inseparable from meaning.

The french horn parts have been conceived and played by Noemi Ciafro.

Valerio Orlandini (1986) is a composer and sound designer from Florence, Italy. Active since 2005 in the field of ambient/industrial music, he then oriented his research towards a meeting point of electroacoustic and concrete music, field recordings and electronic sound design, also integrating his studies in biology and informatics.

During the last years he played in many live events, often collaborating with other musicians coming from different backgrounds, and released some music on CD and tape. He had some compositions played at international festivals, like MUSLAB, Sound and Music Computing, Tempo Reale, In Sonora and Futura.

He studied Music and New Technologies at the Conservatory of Florence “Luigi Cherubini” and currently is a PhD researcher in the field of music, perception and AI while also working as software developer and researcher of music and multimedia applications.

This electroacoustic composition explores the idea of "detritus" as fragments and residues left behind by sound. Drawing from the Latin root dētrītus, meaning "worn away," the work highlights the quiet tension between absence and presence. Using spatial audio, the piece integrates subtle sonic remnants captured from previous performances, each fragment evoking memory and decay. The composition is restless. It is constantly shifting form, pushing sounds into new configurations before they can stabilize. This ongoing churn shapes an immersive space that exposes how listening and memory are continually renegotiated. In this composition, I tried to situate the listener not as an external observer, but as someone embedded within the sound itself. Rather than presenting sonic events as discrete, spatially located phenomena within the ambisonic field, the piece constructs an immersive environment in which the listener becomes part of a continuously evolving sonic mechanism. This mechanism shifts from one scene or state to another, carrying the listener along a trajectory of transformation, an unfolding passage through different states of being within the aural space.

Shane Byrne is a composer and educator working in the field of creative media. His areas of interest include audio-visual composition, spatial audio, human- computer interaction, and acoustic ecology.

His works have been performed internationally at festivals and conferences including ICMC, TIES, Sound/Image festival, SMC, iFIMPac, and Sonorities.

He is currently the program lead on the BSc (Hons) in Music and Sound Engineering at TUS Midlands where he lectures in Electroacoustic Composi- tion, Interactive Audio, Audiovisual Composition, Visual Creation, and Audio Electronics.

https://www.shanebyrne.xyz/

Spider web, late fall;

Jeweled strands of frost and silk

Catch the falling leaves.

Ben Fuhrman, is a composer, musician, programmer, and coffee aficionado. As a result, he writes music with a focus on technology, including acousmatic, interactive, and improvisatory works. His degrees are from Michigan State University (D.M.A and M.M in composition), and Hope College (B.Mus in violin performance). His teachers include Ricardo Lorenz, Mark Sullivan, Steve Talaga, Rob Lunn, and Mihai Craioveanu.

He has had works commissioned from a number of performers, including Keith Kirchoff, Drake Dantzler, Violet, Jeffrey Loeffert, Nathan Boggert, the H2 Quartet, the East Lansing High School Orchestra, REACH Studio Art, and the MSU National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory and Facility for Rare Isotope Beams, and has been performed throughout the world. He was also the recipient of a billboard dedicated to his music from the Arts Council of Greater Lansing – possibly the first composer in the US to receive one. His solo albums “Concrete Oasis” and “Synthesizer and Computer Works” are available online, among others on the Albany Records, Argali Records, Blue Griffin, Elmstreet, and SEAMUS labels.

He maintains an active role as a performer and as assistant professor of music technology at Montana State University, and has previously taught at Oakland University and Mott Community College. For more information, check out www.benfuhrman.com

Architecture éphémère is a fixed-media work that creates an immersive experience in which listeners can lose themselves in the time and space of the music. The title refers to the idea that spatial music can generate an ephemeral, constantly evolving architecture that overlays the physical environment. Drawing on philosopher Gernot Böhme, my practice explores how the diffusion of sound shapes the atmosphere of the spaces we inhabit.

The piece explores tensions between opposing spatial sensations—proximity and distance, intimacy and immensity—and the depth of field of the sonic space. Most of the materials are generated through sound synthesis, which I use to create sounds with different shapes, sizes, and densities. Architecture éphémère unfolds as a journey through distinct atmospheres, shifting from explosive, detailed passages, where trajectories can be pinpointed, to soft, diffuse, hypnotic spaces that verge on disorientation.

The opening section presents a frontal sound mass that slowly advances, suggesting immensity and inexorability, before bursting into aggressive gestures that travel along multiple trajectories, as if caught in an explosion. Wide-range glissandi, projected into a rich ambisonic reverberation, reinforce the sense of motion and tension, immersing the audience in a deep and articulated sound field.

A second phase is inspired by the image of a vast snowy expanse whose boundaries remain invisible. Here, slowly evolving sine waves, often difficult to localise, create an ambiguous, enveloping atmosphere. Moving on circular trajectories at slightly different speeds, they intersect to form chords, clusters, and beating patterns, some in very low registers that engage the body as much as the ear. Occasional sharp editing cuts introduce subtle spatio-temporal breaks, further intensifying the hypnotic effect.

Architecture éphémère was initially composed during the workshop series Composing Fixed-media Multichannel Music on a Hybrid Loudspeaker Array led by Pierre Alexandre Tremblay (2022–2023) at the Multimedia Room (MMR) of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology (CIRMMT) in Montreal, and reworked in 2025.

The version presented at the Spatial Audio Gathering 2026 has a duration of 6'17". A full-length version (11'51") also exists.

Nicola Giannini is a composer and researcher who creates immersive spatial sound experiences, which he conceives as ephemeral always-evolving sonic architectures. He explores the interaction between people, sound, space and context, balancing the organic with the synthetic, intensity with delicacy. He is inspired by the tension between nature unpredictability and the human quest for control. By exploring the most visceral aspects of sound, he aims to create sonic spaces where the public can almost touch the sound and feel completely immersed in it.

His pieces have been presented in North and South America, Australia, Asia and Europe at Ars Electronica, Centre PHI, Akousma, San Francisco Tape Festival and Cube Fest, among others. Recognition includes first prize at JTTP 2019 (Canadian Electroacoustic Community), the 2022 Akousma Immersive music Audience Award, and other honours.

Originally from Italy, Giannini obtained a doctorate in music composition from the Université de Montréal, where he taught electroacoustic composition, performance and installation. Now a FRQSC-funded post-doctoral fellow at UQAM and McGill University Sounds in the City Lab, he researches immersive co-creation and public space composition. A member of Groupe de recherche en immersion spatiale (GRIS) since 2018, he contributes to the open-source spatialisation suite SpatGRIS and, with Jean-Philippe Jullin, developed MapSPAT, a spatialisation tool that creates trajectories based on sound variations.

Moving Pieces is a palette of sounds and gestures that, to me, feel moving—emotionally or in a literal, physical sense. This work highlights that so-called “unwanted” noises, such as handling a recording device mid-recording or residual electromagnetic hum, can be as impactful as a string passage, a tonal sustained guitar drone, or a whisper. What it means to be moved or touched by these sounds in the context of this piece—how, and whether they are moving at all—is left for the listener to decide.

Jekaterina Viltšenko is a composer, sound designer, and artist. They are currently studying Music Technology at the Sibelius Academy of the University of the Arts Helsinki, and completing their Erasmus studies in Sonology at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague.

Jekaterina's work spans a wide range of genres and practices, including electroacoustic composition, live performance, and sound design for stage and visual media. Through sonic storytelling, they explore the boundaries of music, experimentation, and narrative, moving between the familiar and the reimagined, on the margins of explorations where raw sound is stretched, sculpted, and transformed into textured landscapes and abstractions. Themes of connectedness, belonging, periphery, sense of place, and intimacy are most explored in their electroacoustic works.

https://vilts.ch

This paper explores how binaural recording can operate as an ethnographic and creative tool for investigating the spatial, affective, and political dimensions of devotional sound. Drawing on fieldwork conducted between 2022 and 2025 in Egypt between Cairo and the Delta region, the study explores the devotional practice of Dhikr by employing participatory binaural recordings and re-listening interviews to examine how spatial sound mediates spiritual presence and collective experience. The analysis situates these immersive sound practices within broader discussions of spatial audio, sonic phenomenology, and the politics of listening, proposing the notion of sonic in-betweenness to describe how binaural sound articulates relations between human and non-human entities, self and Other. The paper argues that spatial audio technologies enable new modes of listening that are at once ethnographic, affective, and transductive.

In the context of real-time spatial composition for Augmented Musical Instruments (AMIs), gesture plays a crucial role. Metaphorically, gesture can be treated as an energetic and perceptual phenomenon inferred directly from the evolving morphology of sound, without relying on physical motion description. We extend a gesture-based approach grounded in spectromorphology analysis toward the inclusion of spatial properties: spatial attributes are derived from the same spectro-energetic cues that shape instrumental sound structures. Spatial images thus emerge as coherent spatial deployment of sonic gestures within a listening-based feedback loop. This integration enables a real-time ecosystem where gesture, sound, and space continuously modulate one another, opening new possibilities for expressive spatial composition.

This paper considers the compositional advantages of spatial sequencing: the precise, deferred-time specification of the spatiotemporal dimension of a multichannel composition. Spatial sequencing allows composers to develop spatialisation through iterative refinement alongside the music itself, weaving the spatial element tightly into the fabric of the work. This aesthetic of integrated spatialisation is described and presented through the case study of strung (2021), an acousmatic piece spatialised with Space Control, the author’s original software for sequencing and layering complex spatial trajectories. Analysis of this work shows how suitable spatial-sequencing tools enable the creation of spatialisation models that articulate specific relationships between sounds, and how these models can enhance or transform the expressive roles of sounds within a composition. The paper argues that this method offers a coherent and replicable framework for integrating spatialisation into the compositional process with a level of intentionality and precision commensurate with traditional musical parameters.

“Tree Tones (Variation I)” is an electroacoustic multimedia piece that aims to compose a journey through surrealist worlds of natural elements in which spatialized resonating 'raindrops' and noise-filtered 'wind' engage with improvisational bansuri flute and visual projection to explore the subtle beauties in human-nature-technology relationships. In it's employment of sound-manipulation, spatialization and real-time audiovisual mapping, this journey embraces the brilliance of technology as not an adversary, but a medium in which to prioritize humans' coexistence with the vastness of nature.

Timothy “Ill Poetic” Gmeiner is a San Diego, California-based interdisciplinary artist-educator, emcee and music producer. He has worked as the Assistant Producer/Director at the Qualcomm Institute’s Audio Spatialization Lab and is currently enrolled in UC-San Diego’s Computer Music PhD program where he focuses on spatialized and interactive compositions in virtual reality, audiovisual live performance, and large-scale real-time reactive installations. His work in virtual reality has won awards at the ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology (VRST) and has been published in the ACM Digital Library (Gmeiner and Murakami (2023)).

He has toured internationally and garnered public acclaim for his work from Rolling Stone, Pitchfork and more. He has taught courses on hip-hop at UC-San Diego and is currently a professor of music production and entrepreneurship at San Diego City College.


Ben Guerrette

Ben Guerrette is an immersive experience designer who creates environments that transport the viewer into a state of play and wonder. Through light, visuals, and sound, he crafts environments that tell a story and bring people together. He is co-producer of ’City Lights’ a winter light event that takes place at Quartyard in the East Village of San Diego, CA.


Anita Chandavarkar

Anita Chandavarkar is a flutist, improviser, and composer living in San Diego, California. In addition to playing Western flute in a contemporary context, Anita plays bansuri bamboo flute in the Hindustani classical tradition, and was a featured performer at the University of Chicago’s Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures. She studies with Lyon Leifer, a disciple of Pandit Devendra Murdeshwar.

Studio III - Space and Colour (2021-2024) is an audiovisual composition that belongs to the author’s PhD practice-based research portfolio, in which he investigated the concept of intermedial interference.

In Studio III - Space and Colour, the author tested his idea of intermedial interference by manipulating shared spatial and saturation features between sound and image. In stereophonic acousmatic compositions, sound placement, filtering, and spectral emphasis simulate the visual depth of field. Similarly, visual space is altered through blurring, distortion, split-screens, and shifts in colour saturation.

A direct audiovisual relationship was established by linking monophonic sound with monochromatic imagery, and wide, saturated sounds with blurred, colour-saturated footage. The composition employs a recurring triptych split-screen, pre-conceived as a structural sketch, to experiment with synchronised audiovisual movements and varying degrees of saturation.

The study progresses from non-narrative, representational close-ups of flowers with processed instrumental/organic sounds to landscape shots paired with soundscapes. Throughout, associative mapping between media features—such as a centrally placed, filtered sound moving in sync with a desaturated central visual panel—creates perceptual fractures and a unified, expanded perceptual space. This interference directs attention to the media interaction itself, generating tension, relaxation, and narrative ambiguity through mimetic sonic hints.

A key finding of this study is that stereophonic audio may limit the full perceptual potential of such intermedial work. While binaural mixing improves spatial rendering, multichannel diffusion and cinematic screens are ideally needed to effectively balance and expand the integrated audiovisual experience. The presented version of Studio III - Space and Colour is a 2024 remix in 5.1 format.

Antonino Chiaramonte is an internationally renowned composer of electroacoustic music, a live electronics performer, sound designer, and video artist. He graduated in flute from the Santa Cecilia Conservatoire in Rome. He studied composition under Mauro Cardi and obtained a First-Class Diploma in Electronic Music Composition from the Perugia Conservatoire with Luigi Ceccarelli. He holds a PhD in electroacoustic audiovisual composition (intermedial composition) from Bournemouth University (UK), with his thesis titled “Intermedial Interference in Electroacoustic Audiovisual Composition: An Investigation into Combining, Integrating, and Fusing Sound and the Moving Image – A Portfolio of Audiovisual Compositions”

He is a professor of “Performance and Interpretation of Electroacoustic Music” at the Conservatoire of Frosinone in Italy. He has also worked as a part-time lecturer for the MAs in Sound Design for Film & TV at the Faculty of Media & Communication, Bournemouth University. His research explores the intersection and interaction between electroacoustic music and moving images. He focuses on experimenting with new expressive forms that emerge from the interference of various creative idioms and technologies applied to the arts. His work is dedicated to intermedial audiovisual composition.

He is a member of the EMERGE (Experimental Media Research Centre) at Bournemouth University. Additionally, he is active as a film soundtrack composer, and his works have been performed in many countries, including Italy, Switzerland, the USA, Canada, Belgium, the Netherlands, China, France, Finland, Japan, and the UK.

States of Water is composed for stereo fixed electronics and video by Zouning Anne Liao. Prologue, the opening movement of this work invites the listener into a immersive and magnified world—one in which the familiar substance of water becomes both material and metaphor. While the piece is rooted in the observable states of water, it approaches them in an abstract and imaginative way: not as literal depictions, but as points of departure from which sound and image can drift, distort, and transform.

Prologue offers water as subject, symbol, and imaginative collaborator—opening a space where the physical and the speculative meet, and where the act of looking deeply becomes its own form of discovery.

Born in Guangdong, China, Zouning is a composer and sound designer whose music reflects her fascination with nature, malfunctioning machines, distorted noises, and the interplay between refined and raw timbres. Driven by a curiosity about the expressive potential of electronic circuits, she is passionate about DIY electronics, building her own sensor instruments to explore new sonic possibilities shaped by physical gestures.

Her compositions have been showcased across the United States, Europe, and China. In 2025 her works have been featured in festivals and conferences such as Sonic Pavilion Festival, IRCAM ManiFeste, ICMC, Digital Dialogue workshop at the IMPULS Academy, and SPLICE Festival. Now based in Chicago, Zouning is in her second year of a PhD program in Music Composition and Technology at Northwestern University. Outside of her academic work, she can often be found in the woods capturing field recordings or at the post office, collecting stamps.

Gravitanz (from “gravity” and Tanz, the German word for “dance”) is an audiovisual work exploring perceptual instability through sound and spatial experience. The piece investigates the human body as a frame of reference within curved space- time, translating physical models of gravity and orientation into auditory phenomena. The work’s primary dramaturgical engine is spatialisation. 6th-order Ambisonics generates a 3D sonic field in which particle-like densities and trajectories oscillate between chaotic dispersion and sharply defined spatial gestures. Clouds of grains sometimes drift randomly, at other times articulating precise relationships with flashes of light or performer movements. This dynamic interplay creates a continuous sense of attraction and repulsion, clustering and dissolution, weightlessness and sudden gravitational pulls.

Sound material is derived from samples and multiple synthesis techniques, subtractive, granular, pulsar, Karplus-Strong, and wavefield, to which real-time spatialisation strategies have been applied, generating continuously shifting 3D soundscapes. Some gestures use synthesized plucked sounds, referencing the Hindu myth of Shiva’s birth, and thus the birth of space-time. These gradually morph into voice grains, evoking the Creator’s logos. Audio was produced and processed with Flux:: Spat Revolution and the IEM libraries, employing 6th-order Ambisonics, ideally for dome projection.

Spatialisation is conceived as an immersive, perceptual principle, allowing the listener to inhabit an environment oscillating between coherent geometry and disorientation. The camera, though primarily a visual tool, interacts with the performance to emphasise spatial depth and movement, supporting the sonic dramaturgy rather than dominating it. Visual recordings, ranging from time-lapse to 3D slow motion, follow the performer’s body, creating a correspondence between spatialised sound and visual movement.

Founded in 2022 by Italian artists from Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol Matteo Marzano, Fabio Grandinetti, and Gianni Tamanini, GodModE Collective is dedicated to research and experimentation in the audiovisual field. The collective explores musical compositional techniques alongside the latest methods of image recording and manipulation. God Mode Collective fosters collaboration with artists from diverse backgrounds, seeking intersections between disciplines and innovative means of expression.


Matteo Marzano Matteo Marzano: concept, direction, video editing

Matteo Marzano (1990, Italy) is a freelance motion graphics designer and video editor who works with advertising agencies. His clients include Prodigious, Saatchi & Saatchi and Leo Burnett. He previously worked as a junior VFX producer and compositor for a post-production company. He is trained in design, screenwriting, cinematography and animation. In 2021, he directed his first animated short film, “Lino Porçel”.


Stefania Bertola: performer

Stefania Bertola, dancer, choreographer, teacher, trained as a dancer, initially in Bolzano, and then continued her studies in Milan, Berlin, New York and Israel. Her path is directed towards contemporary dance, perfecting herself as a dancer and teacher at the CIMD (International Centre for Movement and Dance, Franca Ferrari) in Milan with the ’Professional Training of the Contemporary Dancer’ and deepening her role as ’Choreographic Composer’ with the Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch. She is continuing with his research process towards new dance codes, always learning from improvisation and research into the quality of movement.


Gianni Tamanini: music composition, mixing, spatialisation

Gianni Tamanini is an electroacoustic composer, sound artist, and PhD candidate in Creative Sound Arts at the Conservatory of Bolzano-Bozen. He holds degrees with honours in Electronic Music and Sociology and works across electroacoustic composition, film scoring, and sound design. His soundtracks for experimental films by Jos Diegel and the GodModE collective have received international recognition. He collaborates with dancer Stefania Bertola and has produced audio post-production for various local audiovisual works and the Zelig School of Cinema. His compositions have been performed at venues including LUB and Museion (Bolzano), Centro Ricerche Musicali (Rome), and Silence (Bari). He was a finalist for the Premio Nazionale delle Arti, won the Mid-Side 2021 call, and has released works with Empirica Records. His research includes publications such as Making Music Together (DIMMI 2022) and forthcoming contributions.


Fabio Grandinetti: sound engineer

Fabio Grandinetti, freelance sound engineer, electronic composer and producer. He attended the Music Electronic course at the Bolzano Conservatory, and many masterclasses with famous artists (Horacio Vaggione, Mario Mary, Achim Bornh¨oft, Johann Ramstr¨om, and many others). He works regularly as sound engineer with the cooperative Teatroblu Onlus in Bolzano and as a composer of contemporary dance music within the association La Quinta Danza in Bolzano. As sound engineer he also worked for the Transart festival ed. 2021, and for the album Metanoia (2023) by Mark Nowakowski. His electro-acoustic music works were awarded and performed at the 2019 Diffrazioni Multimedia Festival Firenze, Premio Nazionale delle Arti (finalist).


Ide Maman: assistant camera operator

Ide Maman (1983, Niger) is a director, film and theatre screenwriter, actor, photographer, cultural mediator. Born in Zinder (Niger), he lives in Italy (Bolzano). Since his first documentary, Ide has always worked on projects focusing on marginalized ethnic groups, peoples and cultures, working between Africa and Europe. He studied at a school of participatory video and documentary cinema.

This paper presents a novel framework for adaptive multi-channel sound diffusion that dynamically optimizes spatial energy distribution in real-world environments through continuous acoustic feedback analysis. Conventional spatialization methods, such as Ambisonics and Vector Base Amplitude Panning (VBAP), typically employ fixed gain structures and assume ideal listening geometries, resulting in perceptual inconsistencies when applied to variable acoustic conditions. The proposed system introduces an adaptive control mechanism that monitors room response characteristics and autonomously recalibrates diffusion parameters in real time to maintain spatial uniformity and perceptual stability. The architecture comprises a flexible loudspeaker array integrated with distributed calibration microphones that capture short-term energy levels, inter-channel coherence, and phase alignment across the listening area. These measurements are processed by a feedback analysis engine to compute a spatial uniformity index, which serves as the optimization target for a closed-loop adaptive controller. The controller continuously adjusts the gain, delay, and equalization values to minimize spatial energy variance while applying perceptual smoothing to prevent audible modulation. Simulation and laboratory evaluations demonstrate that the adaptive framework improves spatial consistency by approximately 30% compared to static diffusion configurations, without significant increases in computational cost or latency. The results indicate that the proposed method effectively compensates for spatial distortions caused by reflections, audience movement, and venue asymmetry. This contribution offers a scalable and energy-efficient approach to context-aware sound diffusion, enabling responsive spatial performance systems, adaptive installations, and reconfigurable immersive environments where diffusion operates as an autonomous, self-correcting process.

Through an autoethnographic analysis of Ouroboros, a work that uses a sculpture as an interface for controlling digital signal processing and spatialisation, this research aims to enhance the experience of mixed electroacoustic music and spatial perception in live performance contexts. Using Emmerson’s local and field functions as a framework, Ouroboros explores the interaction between the performer-field and the perceptual experiences of the performer and the audience within a three-dimensional sound space through the use of a hybrid sculpture.

The composer will discuss the various uses of audio-spatialisation in works from “Red Bird” to “The Garden of Earthly Delights” : spatial distribution of sound material to differentiate or even define musical objects, to define imagined spaces, or to separate initially bonded materials into separate audio-streams, to apparently move the listener through space, or the space through the listener.

TREVOR WISHART: (b 1946) Composer/performer from the North of England specialising in sound metamorphosis, and constructing the software to make it possible (Sound Loom / CDP). He has lived and worked as composer-in-residence in Australia, Canada, Germany, Holland, Sweden, Mexico and the USA.

He creates music with his own voice, for professional groups, or in imaginary worlds conjured up in the studio. His recent work “The Garden of Earthly Delights” (2021) is a darkly comic take on the human situation using the voices of actors, singers and politicians.

He is also the principle developer of music processing software for the Composer’s Desktop Project. His aesthetic and technical ideas are described in the books On Sonic Art, Audible Design and Sound Composition.

In 2008 he was awarded the international Giga-Herz Grand prize for his life’s work, and in 2018 the British Association of Songwriters, Composers and Authors (BASCA) Award for Innovation.

For further information consult www.trevorwishart.co.uk

The performance investigates real-time electroacoustic improvisation for two performers using synthesizers and gestural MIDI controllers in conjunction with Spatial Agents, a spatialisation framework developed at IRCAM. Incoming mono and multichannel audio is analysed through spectral descriptors and mapped to an agnostic diffusion engine configured for an Ambisonics-based immersive system, treating timbre and space as interdependent compositional parameters. A proprietary algorithm models and manipulates impulse responses in real time, reconfiguring early reflections according to source position and thereby enhancing spatial realism and extending the optimal listening area. Rather than relying on random trajectories, the setup establishes a spatial feedback loop in which analysis-driven spatialisation and performers’ actions mutually inform one another, yielding a continuously evolving timbral–spatial texture

Alberto Maria Gatti is a composer, computer music designer, and sound designer. His main interest lies in electroacoustic music, ranging from acousmatic music to music theatre. Since 2018, he has been exploring the relationship between body and sound, using vibrating transducers to transform objects and bodies into sound diffusers, in addition to a focus on contemporary techniques of sound generation and manipulation. He has taken part in contemporary music festivals and events at institutions such as IRCAM (Journ´ee Portes Ouvertes 2023, Ircam Forum 2025, Improtech 2025), Berlin Biennale, Inner Spaces, SMC 2024, Forum Wallis, Tempo Reale, Pecci Museum, MA/IN Festival, Milano Books, Milano Musica, Fabbrica Europa, Teatro dell’Opera di Roma, Forum Wallis, and others. He studied electronic music at the Florence Conservatory with Marco Ligabue and Simone Conforti, and earned his AReMus master’s degree at the Rome Conservatory. He later studied composition and sound direction with Tiziano Manca, Vittorio Montalti, Girolamo Deraco, Alvise Vidolin, and Roberto Castello. Since 2021, he has collaborated as a sound designer and dataset designer with Musi-co and Mindkestra. In 2024, he participated in the IRCAM Artistic Residency Program, focusing on multimodal composition and the audio-tactile relationship in sound perception. He currently works as a freelance composer and teaches at the Scuola di Musica di Fiesole and the G. Puccini Conservatory in La Spezia.


Simone Conforti. Composer, computer music designer, wind instruments performer and software developer, born in Winterthur. Ph.D. in Media Studies and graduated in Flute and Electronic Music Composition. Computer Music Designer and Professor at IRCAM, has previously worked as professor of Electroacoustic Composition and Computer Music at the Conservatoire in Cuneo and Florence, as well as a computer music designer and tutor at the CIMM of the Venice Biennale. His research activities have led him to work as a researcher at Basel University, HEM Geneva, HEMU Lausanne and the MARTLab research centre in Florence. Specialising in interactive and multimedia arts, his work also passes through an intense activity of music oriented technology design; within this field, he has developed a range of algorithms, encompassing sound spatialisation, space virtualisation, sound masking and generative music. Co-founder of MUSICO and Soundive, formerly co-founded of MusicFit and MUSST.

This work is a declaration of intent. To not realize an atlas of calculated trajectories, but of abandoning ourselves to a journey adrift: an interstellar voyage propelled by astral winds of mathematical perfection. From our position, gravitational inertia governs the flow of celestial bodies. Objects that seem still, perform rotations and revolutions at unfathomable speed, their vast arcs rendered as languid drifts, while the smallest elements blaze through the acoustic field at startling velocity, leaving luminous traces in their wake.

The sonic environment is a dance of sidereal pathways, where musical fragments accompany our passage with pulsating rhythms. The course of these elements produces webs of isometric deception as time collapses and expands across the surface of our sound dome, while we observe from the center of the orb.

Originally composed in High Order Ambisonics, this work was forged collectively, through shared practices, exchanged sounds, and the unpredictable alchemy of collaboration, allowing the music to evolve in ways no single mind could anticipate.

totaleee is a trio of acousmatic music composers and laptop performers consisting of Giuseppe Pisano-Riise, Andrea Laudante, and Paolo Montella. In their composition work, they use immersive audio technologies to create fictional environments of both plausible and impossible nature. They achieve this through multichannel synthesis techniques, physical modeling of room acoustics, field recordings, and feedback loops.

The trio debuted with their first piece, ‘Non è un compendio di Etologia numerico-digitale,’ in 2023. Since then, their works have been performed in various contexts, including ICMC (2023 Shenzhen, 2024 Seoul), Ircam (Paris), Sonosfera (Pesaro), ACMC (Sydney), Prix CIME, WOCMAT (Taipei), and many others. They have also received awards such as the first prize at ISAC 2024 (International Sonosfera Ambisonics Competition), the Teresa Rampazzi Award at CIM XXIV, and a Distinction per Category at CIME 2023.

[exterior of MACBA, Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain - 23 January 2006]

I’ve always been drawn to the sound of skateboards, particularly in areas where the sound reflects off nearby buildings. In this piece I wanted to use the sounds moving across a space, as well as their percussive characteristics when various moves are undertaken.

In the skateboarding community the word sketch or sketchy refers to a move that hasn’t worked or has failed in some way. I’d spent a good hour watching and listening to this group of skateboarders using the large open space outside the museum, as well as the handrails and steps, leading up to the entrance. Their overall performance was rather sketchy.

The piece forms part of the Aides… mémoires… project with Jonty Harrison, consisting of short form pieces (3-6’) made from single field recordings. To visit the project, please go to https://bit.ly/aidesmemoires.

Pete Stollery studied composition at the University of Birmingham and was one of the first members of BEAST (Birmingham Electroacoustic Sound Theatre) in the early 1980s. Following work as a school teacher in Kent, he moved to Aberdeen to work in higher education. From 2000, he was part of the team which re-introduced music programmes at the University of Aberdeen, including the introduction of doctoral programmes in Composition and the development of the electroacoustic music studios. He was Head of Music for many years and retired as Professor of Composition and Electroacoustic Music in 2022.

His main creative interest is in how humans respond to sounds in their immediate surroundings, in particular sounds that are not necessarily intended for listening purposes, and how an engagement with sound relates to the idea of place. His creative work exists as electroacoustic compositions, sound installations, web-based sound art, as well as instrumental/vocal compositions.

His music is published by the Canadian label empreintes DIGITALes.

petestollery.com

[Poole Harbour, Dorset, UK – 21 August 2005]

Based on a recording of a small rock pool in Poole Harbour (the second-largest natural harbour in the world, after Sydney), this piece attempts to place the listener inside the pool, by focusing on the character of the water’s restless motion, and only occasionally allowing in the sounds of the world beyond.

The piece forms part of the Aides… mémoires… project with Pete Stollery, consisting of short form pieces (3-6’) made from single field recordings. To visit the project, please go to https://bit.ly/aidesmemoires.

Jonty Harrison (born 1952) is a UK-based composer, primarily of multi-channel acousmatic music. He studied at the University of York between 1970 and 1976, before moving to London, where he worked at the National Theatre and City University. In 1980 he joined the Music Department of the University of Birmingham, where he was Director of the Electroacoustic Music Studios and BEAST (Birmingham ElectroAcoustic Sound Theatre), which he founded in 1982. He retired as Professor of Composition and Electroacoustic Music in 2014 and is now Emeritus Professor. He was Guest Professor of Computer Music at the Technische Universität, Berlin (2010) and Leverhulme Emeritus Fellow (2014-15). He is Compositeur Associé with Maison des Arts Sonores/KLANG! Acousmonium, Montpellier, France.

He has been commissioned by leading organisations and performers (INA-GRM, Bourges, ICMA, MAFILM/Magyar Rádió, Arts Council England, Electroacoustic Wales/Bangor University, Maison des Arts Sonores/KLANG! Acousmonium, DEGEM, NOW! Festival, BBC) and won several prizes (Bourges, Ars Electronica, Musica Nova, Destellos, Thomas Selig Fixed Media Award/DEGEM, Lloyds Bank, PRS Prize). His music appears on four solo albums (empreintes DIGITALes , Montreal) and on several compilations (NMC, Mnémosyne Musique Média, CDCM/Centaur, Asphodel, Clarinet Classics, FMR, Edition RZ and EMF).

https://electrocd.com/en/artiste/harrison_jo

2025. Computer generated spatial audio and acoustic voice. 7th order ambisonics.

The computer music is based on the enigmatic mathematical object the E8. E8 can in one way be understood as a symmetric structure in 8 dimensional space generated by repeated reflections of 8 primitive elements. In this work a static interference field in 8D is considered, a field consisting of plane waves along the 240 ‘root’ vectors of the structure. Audio is generated as mappings of properties of this field and projected onto 3D. Several spatial reverberation systems are formed from the structure. The ambisonics format is used to render the geometry into audio, and for every sample there are up to 500 points audio in space. Due to computational intensity the work must be generated offline. Mostly a new version of the piece is generated for every performance. The voice is acoustic in space and the performer is free to move between or around the audience as the setup allows and facilitates it. I have practiced this form over many years, it is a state of mind to enable a precognitive sense to synchronize timing. The text for the vocal performance is taken from S. Kierkegaard’s book ‘Gjentagelsen’ / ‘The Repetition’, written under the pseudonym Constantin Constantius. The book lingers over the question whether anything repeats and if anything can be repeated. The fragments are taken towards the end where the writer speaks about a poet he has invented for this book, a poet who writes poetry of his own. Link to text and translation: https://frekvensverden.dk/files/digter.pdf. But the fragments are not easily understood, they are more meant to appear as signs of Kierkegaard’s work in general, in which some of the stories told start with the story of the paradox and that of the personal perspective. The work is realized as one very large external object for Pure Data. This object is handling all audio processes and the encoding to ambisonics. The programmed framework is depending on some initial settings and as such variations will appear in every rendering. In 2025 the piece was performed at NOTAM Oslo, and at the SMC in Graz.

Born in 1967 in Denmark. Lived in The Netherlands for several decades but I am now based in Denmark. Studies include dance and improvisation at the SNDO Amsterdam and voice with coloratura soprano Marianne Blok. Worked with multi media and improvisational projects of all sorts and sizes the past 30 years. Projects include interpretations of a wide variety of text sources. I work with computer music for a bit more than 20 years. The development of this has been parallel with a self study of higher mathematics aimed at algorithmic composition and DSP. The work in spatial audio has developed thanks to working periods and residencies in places such as CCRMA Stanford, IEM Graz, ICST Zurich, EMS Stockholm and NOTAM Oslo.

Scuttles in pursuit of darkness. Foul-smelling, skin-shedding. A pest of book collections; page-eating, destructive. Ground up with oil, a remedy for earache. Infused in tea as a cure for tetanus. Delicious when fried in a wok. The body flees danger even when the head is removed.

An Insect that Shuns the Light draws partial inspiration from cultural readings on “no-self”, while scuttling away from this realisation. The work was extracted from a nest of unrelated materials gathered over many years: close-up recordings of everyday objects, environmental traces and studio fragments, alongside outputs from non-linear physical models developed in research contexts. These elements collide across four loosely defined episodes, in which eruptions of activity are disgorged into pockets of stillness and apparent void.

Rather than treating space as backdrop or added production value, the piece treats spatialisation as a driver of meaning. The listener is conveyed through a succession of unstable, often surreal environments. Sometimes, this proceeds with a sense of coherence and orientation, and other times, with bafflement and disorientation. The perceived centre of listening is repeatedly unsettled.

From the corner of its eye, the work perceives the ideas that both “self” and “space” may be better understood as ongoing processes than as fixed entities. Rapid shifts between saturation and near-emptiness, between tightly enclosed and open, distant scenes, are used to suggest a comically frightening instability: a subject who cannot quite locate itself, fleeing illumination yet continually re- exposed. Through these movements, the piece investigates a making and unmaking of place: one of the most potent affordances of immersive audio.

Gordon Delap is an audiovisual artist and electroacoustic composer from Donegal, Ireland. He has undertaken residencies at Nadine Arts Centre in Brussels, the University of Edinburgh, Technische Universit¨at Berlin, and SCRIME at the University of Bordeaux, where he has collaborated with technical teams on creative applications of physical modelling and spatial technologies.

His music and sound works have been selected for and awarded in international competitions and festivals, and have been presented in concert halls, galleries and public spaces in Europe and beyond. He is currently based in Dublin and teaches at the National University of Ireland Maynooth.

Songs to be Burnt No. 1 is an electroacoustic composition that delves into the dark universe of Isidore Ducasse’s Les Chants de Maldoror. The piece draws its inspiration from the following words, which serve as an introductory warning before entering a sonic realm shaped by the monstrous: "May Heaven grant that the reader, emboldened and momentarily rendered as fierce as what he reads, may find, without losing his way, the steep and savage path through the desolate marshes of these sombre and venom-filled pages; for unless he brings to his reading a rigorous logic and a tension of mind at least equal to his distrust, the deadly exhalations of this book will seep into his soul as water does into sugar. It is not good that everyone should read the pages that follow; only a few will savour this bitter fruit without danger. Therefore, timid soul, before penetrating further into such uncharted wilderness, turn your heels backward rather than forward.”

Arnau Gran i Romero (born in 2001) is a Catalan composer, pianist, and researcher based in Paris. His artistic practice lies at the crossroads of instrumental writing, electroacoustic music, and technological experimentation, exploring how digital processes redefine musical form, interpretation, and perception.

He began his musical training at the Conservatory of Girona, where he studied piano, cello, and harpsichord, before specialising in composition with José Manuel López López at the Conservatoire à Rayonnement Régional de Paris, where he received his Diplôme d’Études Musicales with highest honours. He holds a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in musicology and computer-assisted composition from the University of Paris VIII, where he is currently pursuing a PhD within the Centre for Computer Research in Music and Sound (CICM). His dissertation is part of the Generative Spatial Sound Synthesis project, focusing in particular on unified operational representations of sound spatiality. At the same time, he is enrolled at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris (CNSMDP), where he studies composition with Clara Iannotta and new technologies with Roque Rivas and Yan Maresz.

His musical language explores gestural complexity, fragile textures, and the relationship between acoustic material and its electronic transformation. His works have been performed by ensembles such as the Ensemble Intercontemporain, L’Itinéraire, Cairn, TM+, Sinkro, MG21, 2E2M, and the Feedback Trio, and presented at international festivals including Mostra Sonora Sueca, MA/IN (Rome), and Supersonique (France). In 2024, he was selected by Ensemble Divertimento for the Incontri Internazionali per Giovani Compositori “Franco Donatoni” programme, with a new work centred on ecological themes. His compositions are published by Éditions Lacroch’.

I even said we should become the sound. If the sound moves upward I also move upward; if it moves downwards, I go down too. If it becomes quieter, so do I. - Karlheinz Stockhausen

This composition is accompanied by my master thesis about spatial motion. In it, I detail the specifics of psychoacoustics and other particularities of human hearing that have to be taken into consideration when composition spatial movements. During the course of the work, it slowly ‘frees’ itself from this didactical style and showcases other variants of spatial motion.

Jakob Gille began his formal education at the Hochschule für Musik Carl Maria von Weber Dresden, where he studied composition and music theory. His passion for sound and experimentation led him to institutions such as the ZKM Karlsruhe and the Darmstädter Ferienkurse. There, he worked with the Akusmonium GRM Paris and the Studio für elektronische Musik HfM Dresden respectively. He is the driving force behind Into Sound, an initiative that has organised multiple concerts in Berlin for 3D loudspeaker setups since its inception in 2018.

His compositions have been played several times at the Medium Sonorum concert at the Ars Electronica Linz, in Ústí nad Labem in combination with the Ambisonics Summer School 2023, at the Festival Izis in Koper and the Apnées Festival in Grenoble. In 2023, he won an honourable mention at ISAC in Pesaro and in 2025 the silver award at the S3DAPC Competition of the IEM Graz.

In 2025, he earned a master’s degree in computer music and sound art at KUG & IEM Graz.

Inflections as sound process to sound quality
Emanating otherness of the
Sound quality to sound process from the reflective

Resulting in an immersive rhizome-like sound world of the omnipresent of the
dream like and the very literal

As different zones are successive, simultaneous, above, below, before, and after, to
neither rise nor sink but only float

A longing as the friction, disputes of the literal and dream-like

And

A persistence of a pulse, heavy, through the literal as a constant movement and the
abstract ingenuous stillness, a sound world of the discursive and the narrative

Chiastic process and quality are undermined as the reflections and inflections recur
in rounded proportions. The immersive and form is only tangible through this
insistence that is perceived as a dream occurring in real-like time

Figuratively
Whale Song suggests, quite literally, uncertainty that is

Stuck between the discursive and the narrative,
The moving streams/waves and the pure tones surrounding within,
Stranding

David Quang-Minh Nguyen is an educator, sound designer/re-recording mixer, and composer of concert music. His current interests lie in composing acousmatic works that explore sound spatialization, and immersive audio.

Recognized nationally and internationally, David has had his works presented at the June in Buffalo New Music Festival, where he received individual master classes with Harvey Sollberger, Martin Bresnick, Roger Reynolds, and Brian Ferneyhough. He was an active participant in the Festival DME under the direction of Åke Parmerud, Musique & Recherches Académie d'été de composition électroacoustique under the direction of Annette Vande Gorne and João Pedro Oliveira, and the Sounds Around Me Festival under Thomas Gorbach. He was also selected by Master Artist Robert Normandeau for a residency at the Atlantic Center for the Arts.

His works have been presented at numerous national and international events, and he is a laureate or finalist in several competitions. He has been published on ABLAZE Records' Electronic Masters Vol. 7 and received an honorable mention at the XII° Destellos Electroacoustic Competition 2019 for his work Misprints. He also placed 2nd in the XIII° Destellos competition for Adumbrations, was a finalist for the PRIX CIME 2019, and won 2nd place for the ASCAP/SEAMUS Award for his work Weight Stranding. In 2021, his SEAMUS-commissioned piece Whale Song Stranding was selected for presentation on the SEAMUS 31 CD and received the Ars Electronica Forum Wallis selection. David was awarded the Prix CIME 2023 Residency Award for Whale Song Stranding. His work Texture Arc the Points won 1st place in the ULJUS Međunarodno Pijanističko Takmičenje Smederevo Competition and 2nd place in the prestigious Concours Biennal de Composition Acousmatique Métamorphoses.

David Q. Nguyen holds a BM from Old Dominion University, where he studied with Andrey R. Kasparov and Mark Chambers. He has received his Master and a Doctor of Musical Arts degree at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where his primary teachers are Reynold Tharp, Erik Lund, Eli Fieldsteel, Sever Tipei, and Scott A. Wyatt.

As Dolby Atmos becomes increasingly prevalent in streaming platforms and cinema systems, new possibilities emerge for integrating immersive audio workflows into electroacoustic composition. This extended abstract presents the MaxBridge, a modular patch developed in Max/MSP as a proof-of-concept demonstrating how composers can translate spatialised works into the Dolby Atmos format while maintaining artistic intent. By bridging Ambisonics and object-based rendering, the approach offers a practical and adaptable workflow for both fixed-media and real-time performance contexts. Rather than a finished product, the MaxBridge functions as a flexible DIY prototype that can inspire electroacoustic composers and sound artists to develop personalised spatial workflows compatible with Dolby-certified environments. A short anonymous video demonstration accompanies this submission, showing the patch in operation.

This paper presents the findings of a Practice-as-Research study (MacLeod & Duerden, 2021), analyzing the application and audience impact of in-headphone spatial sound in a contemporary theatrical production. The research addresses a critical need for empirical data regarding the emotional and cognitive effectiveness of immersive audio techniques in live performance settings, aiming to bridge the gap between technical potential (Wightman & Kistler, 1989) and real-world perception.

The study is centered around a critically-acclaimed production where binaural sound design serves as a core dramaturgical element, redefining the boundaries between stage action and the audience’s individual experience. The creative approach leverages sound recording as an expressive opportunity (Giovannucci, 2015), aligning with broader discussions on theater and technology (Dente, 2002). The compositional methodology employed Binaural Ambisonic spatialisation using a commercial-grade plug-in within a professional Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) environment, documented to demonstrate the fusion of the artistic process with performance demands.

To assess the technique’s effectiveness and the achieved level of auditory realism (Guastavino et al., 2007), a quantitative data collection protocol was implemented using a post-performance questionnaire administered to a significant audience sample. The questionnaire explored key perceptual variables, including the perceived level of perceptual, narrative, and emotional immersion (Stenzel et al., 2021), the contribution of spatialisation to emotional involvement, the influence on the perception of scenic space, and overall narrative clarity.

Detailed analysis of the collected data provides empirical validation of in-headphone spatial sound as a potent expressive tool in theater. The results indicate a significant correlation between the perceived movement of sounds and an intensified sense of presence. This work contributes to the literature on applied spatial audio and real-world use-cases in the arts, providing evidence-based guidelines for composers and sound designers working with innovative sound diffusion systems for the stage.

Inudito is an adaptive sound installation exploring multilayer spatial perception through the coexistence of two simultaneous propagation systems: external multichannel diffusion and internal bone conduction. The project investigates how spatialization can extend beyond air propagation, engaging the listener’s body as an acoustic and perceptual medium. The spatial design combines real and virtual propagation models to create a scalable and reconfigurable environment, adaptable to different architectural conditions. Both layers were spatialized and calibrated to maintain spectral balance and spatial coherence while preventing perceptual masking. Short bone-conducted gestural sounds appear in the diffuse external sonic enviroment, setting up a shifting play between foreground and background. The research in Inudito is therefore to find in the spatialization of sound the possibility of uniting intimate and collective listening, through a participatory act of the public, which with its presence becomes an active part of the installation itself.

Two Studies in Ambisonic Spatial Form presents two contrasting yet connected acousmatic works composed natively in Higher-Order Ambisonics. Rather than relying on conventional melodic or harmonic development, the pair focuses on spatial movement, texture and energetic transformation across the Ambisonic field.

Each work explores a particular spatial and sonic character, contributing to a concise programme intended for full sphere Ambisonic diffusion.

The movements were composed across several years and subsequently curated into a single triptych due to their complementary spatial identities. Together they form an immersive fifteen minute experience centred on spatial gesture, texture and motion. For background on Ambisonics and three dimensional audio practice, see (Gerzon, 1973; Zotter and Frank, 2019).


Machine

Machine explores mechanical rhythmic language, tension and release. Percussive and synthetic elements shift through tight localised regions before expanding into wider spatial fields. Layers of rhythm interlock and separate, creating a sense of energetic build up and movement. The spatial palette moves between close, detailed sounds and broader, enveloping textures, producing a dynamic interplay between focus and spread.


Helisynths

Helisynths focuses on rapid, spiralling movements and shifting textural layers. Granulated synthetic sounds rise and fall across the Ambisonic field, creating patterns of swirling motion. These trajectories contrast with sustained harmonic beds, establishing a dialogue between stable spectral material and erratic spatial motion. The result is a vivid and almost kinetic sound world in which motion and texture are tightly interwoven.

James Bagshaw is a composer and researcher whose work focuses on spatial music, electronic composition and immersive audio. Working predominantly in Higher- Order Ambisonics, his practice explores spatial gesture, texture and motion as central artistic materials. His music has been presented on spatial audio systems and in exhibition contexts in the United Kingdom and Internationally. James is a Senior Lecturer in Music Production, and leads the BSc Creative Technologies programme at Leeds Arts University.

Obuténdeka, in the Kubandwa religion —a widespread cult in Central-East Africa— means initiation rite. As one might naturally imagine when thinking of an initiation rite, music plays a decisive role in the ceremony: the steady rhythms of an enymba, a rattle made from a hollowed-out gourd filled with seeds from sacred plants, alternate with the more sporadic sounds of an iron bell, the ekyoma. The extremely precise description of all these musical elements in the Obuténdeka rite, provided by ethnomusicologist Serena Facci, inspired the creation of an electronic interpretation bearing the same name. Obuténdeka is therefore a piece that aims to narrate the various stages of the rite, marked by the recurring presence of a powerful percussive event, symbolizing change and transition.

Alessandro Casolino is a composer and performer who graduated in Electronic Music at the “G. Verdi” Conservatory in Milan, where he is currently continuing his studies in Music Applied to Multimedia and Composition with Davide Gagliardi and Paolo Rimoldi. Active artistically in Milan, he focuses his interest on the singular traits of today’s society, transforming them into pieces and performances that highlight the grotesque and the surreal. He is an active member of the computer music collective Sistema Ensemble and of the Chigiana Live Electronics Ensemble, with which he has performed as an electronic musician in some of the most musically vibrant contexts of the Milanese scene —such as MMT, Divertimento Ensemble, C3, and Agon— as well as at events connected to the Chigiana International Festival, where he has collaborated with Alvise Vidolin, Roberto Fabbriciani, Giancarlo Schiaffini, Tonino Battista, Jacopo Cenni, Alberto Cavallaro, and Manuel Teles.

Seething Field: Imprint is a turbulent interplay of memory and resonance, written for seventh-order ambisonics fixed media. The work unfolds through the filtering, modulation, distortion, and reverberation of a time-stretched recording of Jack Kerouac.

Using ambisonic impulse responses for the Chapel of the Four Chaplains, located in the basement of Temple Performing Arts Center, Seething Field: Imprint harnesses the Chapel’s reverberant and sonic characteristics, a space dedicated to four chaplains who sacrificed their lives on the USS Dorchester—a ship Kerouac once served on but was recalled from before its tragic sinking.

The source material for Seething Field is a brief recording of Kerouac speaking “The Ocean”, time-stretched 512 times from about 1.5 seconds to over 10 minutes. This slow unfolding of speech provides the formal and harmonic structure of the work. The stretched recording was then recursively recorded through the Chapel’s reverb, a process akin to Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room, revealing and reinforcing the shared resonant frequencies of Kerouac’s voice and the Chapel dedicated to the Four Chaplains.

The title draws from the closing lines of Kerouac’s The Sea is My Brother, where ‘the sea stretched a seething field which grew darker as it merged with the lowering sky.’ Seething Field mirrors this seascape, embodying the darkness, expansiveness, and tension of turbulent times, past and present.

Sam Wells is a musician and artist in Philadelphia whose work often invokes a heightened sense of the entanglements of space, air, breath, and body. His work is rooted in the humanity of breath, and highlights our interrelations with the cosmic, terrestrial, social, and internal spaces that surround us.

Sam is a trumpeter and improvisor who has performed around the world and is a member of Aeroidio, the Miller/Vidiksis/Wells trio, and SPLICE Ensemble.

As a composer, Sam creates acoustic, electroacoustic, and electronic works often incorporating multimedia elements. His works have been performed throughout the United States and internationally. As an avid collaborator, Sam has written for theater and dance productions, as well as many notable performers of contemporary music.

Sam is a Cycling ’74 Max Certified Trainer and organizes the Max Meetup Philadelphia event series. He runs Scarp Records, a record label dedicated to highlighting the experimental and improvisational practices of performer/composers.

Sam holds performance and composition degrees at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, graduate degrees in Trumpet Performance and Computer Music Composition at Indiana University, and a doctoral degree at the California Institute of the Arts. Sam is an Assistant Professor of Music Technology and Composition at Temple University.

https://sllewm.as

Towards a Choreography-Inspired Approach to Spatial Electroacoustic Composition is an overview of a doctoral artistic research project that explores the perceived movement of sound as a compositional parameter through the lens of dance theory and human movement. The expressive potential has received less attention compared to the technological aspects of spatial electroacoustic music composition, where various types of loudspeaker setups and algorithms are used to position and move sound sources within a three-dimensional listening space. This research investigates how movement concepts from the field of choreography, together with improvised, embodied sound responses by contemporary dancers, can inform, inspire and possibly reshape the approaches to the spatialization process in electroacoustic music composition.

The project is designed as a qualitative case study investigation, in the sense described by Creswell and Poth, in which each composition constitutes a bounded case that is examined through multiple forms of data, including audiovisual documentation and reflective writing. The cases include the translation of Rudolf Laban’s spatial theories into ambisonic spatialization strategies, and embodied movement sessions in which contemporary dancers respond improvisationally to compound sound patterns. Each case is studied for a broader understanding of how choreographic concepts and embodied experiences inform compositional decision-making in spatial electroacoustic music. The artistic outcome of the research is a series of acousmatic compositions.

This paper provides a practical investigation and critical reflection on the challenges that arise when implementing a binaural conversion workflow for multichannel electroacoustic compositions. Using the specific example of the 3D AudioSpace on soundingfuture.com, the various technical and artistic considerations that arise will be discussed when adapting spatial audio works for listening through headphones.

While it does not present new research, it documents the decision- making process and practical solutions as a technical report. Particular attention is given to the artistic implications of these technical decisions, especially in terms of preserving compositional intent when introducing room virtualization and spatial processing.

The results and recommendations presented here are intended to serve as a practical guide for similar implementation projects, while contributing to a broader discussion on standards and practices for binaural conversion of electroacoustic music.

Materia (lat., substance, cause)–what other, than sound, could be the matter of music? Of course much more: rhythmic, harmonic and melodic structures, every kind of music, even rests. Possible, but I wouldn't like to premise that as given, whose novel malleability, owed to the computer, opens so many spaces as hardly anything else in the history of music. Moreover: no imaginations and ideas that detract from the essence.

Gérard Grisey: " ... our model is sound not literature, sound not mathematics, sound not theatre, visual arts, quantum physics, geology, astrology or acupuncture."

Sound as mutual matter, it shall determine everything else: constellation and process, they ought to emerge from it, equitable, because without unfolding in time even the most sounding remains silent.

How do I find what I like?

Not at all, as I like what I find and I'm searching without knowing for what. It appears and queries me wordlessly, the talk develops within the experiment, the algorithms of transformation and organisation. Whatever in the end maybe–only just–can pass or, simpler then, can't pass in the face of that, what already exists and whereby the new scratches along trundling–that is determined by another matter: me–and in turn not; contingent and only seemingly private are memory and decision.

Daniel Mayer (*1967) is a composer with a focus on works including electro-acoustics. He is active in the fields of sound synthesis and generative computer algorithms, where he is developing dedicated software. His music has been performed at numerous international festivals of electronic and contemporary music and was rewarded with the Giga-Hertz production prize for electronic music 2007 at the Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe (ZKM). He studied pure mathematics and philosophy at the University of Graz (MSc, MPhil) and music composition (MA) with Gerd Kühr at the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz, Austria. 2001/02 postgraduate study at the electronic studio of the Music Academy of Basel, Switzerland, with Hanspeter Kyburz. Since 2011 working at the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz/IEM, from 2011-2014 scientific cooperation within the FWF-funded artistic research project Patterns of Intuition, since October 2016 visiting professor for electro-acoustic composition. From 2014-2017 curatorial work at Kulturzentrum bei den Minoriten, since 2016 together with Gerhard Eckel, Marko Ciciliani, and Ina Thomann for the concert series signalegraz. In the winter term 2022/23, he was Edgard-Varèse guest professor of DAAD at TU Berlin. https://daniel-mayer.at

This piece deals with the sensory overload that we can experience sometimes after a long day of traveling, attending multiple concerts, or when playing several media streams simultaneously at home, for example when opening a browser that has multiple tabs open of music videos and they all start playing at once. At the end of the day we process the recollections of those sounds and experiences in our memory and dreams, and they sometimes appear back in our minds strangely distorted and in unexpected combinations, as if warped in time and space. The work uses synthetic sounds as well as processed recordings of acoustic instruments, which are combined and arranged in space in dense masses of sound.

Originally from Mexico City, he studied philosophy and music at the University of Victoria (Canada), and later at the Xenakis Centre (France), the Institute of Sonology and the Royal and Rotterdam Conservatories (Netherlands), the National Autonomous University of Mexico, the University of Washington’s DXARTS Center (USA), and the University of Birmingham (UK), where he received his Ph.D. He composes sound-based music for acoustic instruments, live electronics, and fixed media, with a focus on timbral and spatial elements, and natural phenomena such as non-linear dynamical systems. Some of his main teachers over the years include Agostino Di Scipio, Julio Estrada, Scott Wilson, Clarence Barlow, Paul Berg, Gilius van Bergeijk, René Uijlenhoet, Carla Scaletti, Michael Longton, Christopher Butterfield, Andrew Schloss, and Alex Dunn. His works have been presented internationally at events such as ICMC, BEAST FEaST, MA/IN, SEAMUS, Gaudeamus, NYCEMF, Sonorities Belfast, Espacios Sonoros, ACMA, FIMNME, Sound/Image Festival, and the Kyma International Sound Symposium. He currently lives in the Netherlands and Germany, working as an independent artist, researcher, and music software developer.

Lein is music that stems from the history of both organ music and electroacoustic music. Although these two fields have followed different paths through history, they share some similarities, not least through experiments that explore and expand both space and time. By listening backwards, certain lines of origin can be transferred from the past to the present, sometimes clear and recognisable, sometimes distorted and fragmented. Microscopic units of rhythm form polyphonic lines as well as alloys of sound, dynamically connecting what was previously unconnected.

Lein is a multichannel fixed-media piece that has been performed at concerts and festivals in Sweden, Germany and at New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival 2025. In June 2025, Lein won two prizes at the international acousmatic composition competition at the Weimarer Frühjahrstage Festival in Germany: Second Prize and the Audience Award.

Kim Hedås is a composer of orchestral, vocal, chamber, and electroacoustic music. Her music has been commissioned and performed by prominent orchestras, ensembles and soloists in Sweden and internationally. Her work also includes electroacoustic works and site-specific music installations. Her compositions have recently been performed internationally and at numerous festivals and venues in Sweden. Kim Hedås is Professor of Composition at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm (Kungliga Musikhögskolan) and a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music (Kungl. Musikaliska Akademien), and holds a PhD from the University of Gothenburg.

This piece was composed as part of the Sample Sound and Music Processing Project (Padova Conservatory) for the Wave Field Synthesis System through WFS Collider software. Risonanze addresses one of my recurring poetic themes in that resonances and space are fundamental aspects in the work. What if the resonances, spatial and timbral attributes of the sound object, become independent of this, with trajectories that gradually move away from the source that originated them? Different change rates can produce radically different and parallel objects which, transforming themselves into textures, increase in width and fuse with the space. The presence of the absence” (resonances: what ”presence” leaves behind) or ”absence of the presence” is a metaphor for our inner life. Composition and spatialization were part of the same process during creation, as Space is a determining parameter of the identity of this sound form. The original format, in Wave Field Synthesis, can be exported in multichannel (variable number of speakers) as long as WFSCollider offers the possibility to render into a version with various types of multi-channel systems using but VBAP calculation. .

Marcela Pavia is an electroacoustic composer and performer; chamber, orchestral, musical theater composer; multimedia composer and educator. She received her Master Degree with distinction in Electronic Music from the Milan Conservatory, a Master Degree in Composition from the National University of Rosario (Argentina) and a Master in Sound Technologies and Music Composition from Parma Conservatory. PHD researcher at the Foggia Conservatory and Jury of S3DAPC Student 3D Ambisonic Production Competition at IEM University of Graz,Composition Contest for Choir at Festival Nuovi Orizzonti Sonori (Porretta Terme) and Composition Competition World Piano Teacher Association 2018 2020 2021 2022. Artistic Residencies at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (USA), Gasteatelier Krone (Aarau Switzerland),Italian Composers Forum Contemporary Music Center in Milan. Her compositions have been performed in many international music festivals including 2025 ICMC Boston, 2025 Festival Aperto Reggio Emilia, 2013 and 2008 ICMC, 2011, 213, 2014 World New Music Days ISCM,2014-2015 SIME (Lille), 2016 CIM (Cagliari), 2017 and 2019 Festival EviMus Saarbrücker Tage für elektroakustische und visuelle Musik (Saarbrucken, Germany), 2018 Ars Electronics Forum Wallis (Switzerland), 2016 EMUFEST (Santa Cecilia Conservatory Rome) and 2024 STEMS Festival of the Acusmonium Audior (Florence). Many of her compositions have won prizes in prestigious competitions including the 2012 European Composition Competition Musiques Eletroacoustiques Universitè Paris 8, Festival Internacional de Arte sonoro SONOM 2012 Monterrey, 2011 Trinac Buenos Aires, and the 2010 Miriam Gideon Prize Search for New Music International Alliance for Women in Music (USA). Many of her scores and works have been published on prestigious editions or labels like Neos (Germany), Berben Editions (Italy), Curci Editions, Delatour Editions (France) and so on. She is author of extended works like Infierno Musical (https//www.youtube.com/watch?v=1awrs4bYjBs), Ira Arka (https://agon.news/ira-arka/), Mirapunzel (Milan Conservatory https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhaMTGOqSfI) and Liminal. Marcela was selected for the 2011 Ircam workshop at the Biennial of Venice and received a Composition scholarship from the Accademia Chigiana (Siena).

Émergences is the third and final part of a series of electroacoustic pieces composed as part of doctoral research on operative representations for spatial sound processing. All three are considered prototypes: they are the (composed) crystallization of work in progress, a way of making perceptible various stages of the research, of which their composition was itself one of the driving forces.

In Émergences, Paul Goutmann explores the appearance of three types of spatial morphologies: strata, spatial textures, and spatial envelopes. Its title refers to the notion of emergence in complex systems theory. Spatial morphologies emerge from a set of operations at different temporal and spatial scales, while remaining irreducible to the sum of the original operations. Starting from filtered impulsive sounds, a sustained note, and a short pre-composed sequence of a few seconds, the sonic material is shaped primarily through original spatial processes developed during his doctoral research.

Paul Goutmann is an artist, researcher, and lecturer in computer music at the CICM (University Paris 8). He is currently a postdoctoral researcher within the ERC Advanced Grant G3S project on spatial audio, and was previously awarded a doctoral fellowship from the ArTeC Graduate School. In 2024, he defended his PhD dissertation entitled “Operative Representation for the Spatial Audio Processing: An Approach of musical and software creation”, supervised by Alain Bonardi and Anne Sèdes. His research focuses on the spatial dimension of sound, its musical implementation, and its capture through technology. Artistically active, he develops a practice that interweaves composition, computer music production, sound recording, and theatre creation, thereby extending his reflections on the spatialization of sound.

This article details the collaborative process of designing and developing VOLTA, a portable loudspeaker array. This project was a joint effort between the two authors, the local music community, and institutions. The aim was to create a tool for small concerts, installations, and educational activities, primarily to disseminate works in ambisonic format and to provide the necessary facilities for the pedagogy of spatial audio in the Naples area, Southern Italy. The article outlines the prototyping process, citing sources of inspiration and similar projects, and offers future perspectives on the development and use of the setup across various contexts, emphasizing its inclusive nature.

Most spatial audio systems implicitly privilege a single ideal listening position, treating all other seats as perceptually degraded. This project proposes an alternative, subject-oriented paradigm in which spatialisation is designed so that each listener hears a different yet equally valid version of the work. Philosophically, it treats listening as world-making rather than passive reception: sound emerges as a relation among bodies, rooms, and signals, and the goal of spatial design is to support many coexisting, locally coherent renderings rather than one “correct” image.

Technically, the project implements a node-based multichannel diffusion system for irregular loudspeaker topologies. Pairwise connections between 26 speakers, with equal-power interpolation points, generate a lattice of 1001 conceptual nodes, each encoded as a gain vector. A precomputed lookup-table pipeline quantises the venue into millions of voxels, enabling audio-rate mapping from any 3D coordinate to its nearest node. This allows dense, polyphonic routing and combinatorial trajectories without prohibitive computational cost. The proposed contribution to SAG outlines the subject-oriented manifesto behind this approach, situates the node- based system in relation to channel- and object-based spatial audio, and presents case-study works that explore how such a lattice can make “no sweet spot” an aesthetic, technical, and ethical design choice.

The work revolves around magnetic fields—spatial audio recordings of electromagnetic phenomena, captured using a custom-built electromagnetic ambisonic microphone by the author, serve as the primary sonic material. These recordings are further transformed and abstracted through visual computer renderings and generative image processes, all programmed and created by the composer in Max/Jitter.

In this work, electromagnetic fields are not presented as sonifications or visualisation of physical data, but rather as a narrative—evoking the concept of mesmerism and a sense of mystic theatre, where unseen forces animate imagination.

Conceptually and poetically, the work draws inspiration from Franz Anton Mesmer’s (1734– 1815) notion of animal magnetism—a historically and discredited pseudoscience that serves as a symbolic point of departure for artistic exploration. Here, imagination engages with the esoteric: a place where belief and doubt intertwine, and unseen energies open a borderland of mystery.

Anders Tveit (1977) is a composer and musician specialising in electroacoustic composition, free improvisation, and sound installations. His artistic practice often centres on the use of self-developed software for real-time processing and spatial sound.

"In my work, I am interested in exploring new approaches to the use of technology, both in the compositional process and in performance. For me, this creates a holistic relationship between method and artistic outcome. It often leads to a blurring of roles—developer, performer, composer—which I find both challenging and creatively inspiring.”

He has composed multichannel electroacoustic works and sound installations that have been presented at venues and festivals including Ultima Contemporary Music Festival (Oslo), INA- GRM (Paris), Only Connect Festival (Trondheim/Oslo), ZKM (Karlsruhe), NIME (London), CCRMA (Stanford), KlangFest (Liechtenstein), Lydgalleriet (Bergen), Sound/Image (London), Jauna Muzika (Lithuania), deciBel Festival (Riga), Oberlin Conservatory (Ohio), Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Princeton University, NJ, Echochroma-Leeds, SoddJazz Festival, Aparte Festival for Experimental Arts, and others.

Tveit is an Associate Professor at the Norwegian Academy of Music, Department of Composition, Music Theory and Music Technology.

I’ll Be Your Co-Pilot: Redux is an audio-visual video work that examines human- technology relationships through algorithmic composition and automated visual response systems. Using the web browser as both medium and creative tool, the work employs four audio files: three audio loops that automatically crossfade over 30-second cycles, creating an ever-shifting soundscape without human intervention. The vocal track operates autonomously, fading in and out at random intervals between 10 and 40 seconds, playing for precisely 10 seconds at full volume before retreating. This removes human control over when the voice appears, suggesting technology’s capacity to assert itself unpredictably. The visual system is created using Three.js, a JavaScript 3D graphics library, rendered directly in the web browser. The system comprises two layers: a fractal noise background using custom GLSL shader code that generates procedural fractal noise patterns, and 1,000 wireframe cubes arranged in a 10x10x10 grid. Each cube is rendered as a wireframe using Three.js’s MeshBasicMaterial. Both layers respond to Web Audio API frequency analysis. The API analyses the playing of audio files in real time using an AnalyzerNode with an FFT size of 512, producing frequency data across 256 bins divided into three frequency ranges: low, medium, and high. Each cube is randomly assigned to a frequency band at initialisation, meaning that the system, not the creator, determines which cubes respond to which frequencies. The cubes scale from 0.25 to 10 times their size and shift from dark grey to bright white based on their assigned frequency band’s amplitude, with scale and colour intensity updated every frame. The audio and visuals from the web browser are captured using OBS and recorded to a video file. The audio received further processing in Ableton Live, where frequency bands are separated into different channels and their spatial qualities are manipulated over time, adding another layer of technological mediation to the work’s examination of human agency within computational systems.

Dr Dylan Davis is a design researcher and lecturer. He has extensive experience in design process, community engagement, digital storytelling, interaction design, and audio production and composition. Dylan is also a composer and musician whose practice covers performance, and production. His Non Traditional Research Outputs (NTROs) includes works for festivals such as Melbourne Music Week, recordings for a range of international record labels and community based music projects. This research utilises reflective practice to further understand and explore the compositional and performance methods and practices for electronic and electroacoustic music of the techno and acid house genre.

This work offers a fresh interpretation and perspective on historical masterpieces, utilizing contemporary technologies and tools. Specifically, it revisits two dances directed by Alice Guy-Blaché: Danse Serpentine (1897) and Danse Excentrique (1902).

One of the core ideas explores the transition between potential energy and dynamic energy, reflecting the movement between tension and release that mirrors lived human experience. Life continuously oscillates between struggle, obstacle, resolution, and the return to challenge — a cycle echoed in both sound and visual motion.

Alice Guy-Blaché (1873–1968) was a pioneering filmmaker, recognized as one of the first creators of narrative cinema and the first woman to direct a film. Despite her foundational role, her contributions were overlooked for decades, a historical erasure that resonates deeply with the themes of this work.

Moved by these two early cinematic pieces, I sought to reinterpret them through contemporary audiovisual composition, paying homage to Guy-Blaché’s visionary work while exploring new artistic possibilities.

Seyed Ali Hosseini Born in 1991 in Tehran, Iran. I hold a Bachelor’s degree in Composition from the Tehran Conservatory of Music, where I focused on Classic music and composition. Currently, I am pursuing a Master’s degree in Applied Music (Musica Applicata) at the Conservatorio G. Nicolini in Piacenza, Italy. My studies encompass electroacoustic, electronic, and contemprory composition, as well as sound design and the integration of video and short films. I am currently exploring new approaches to composition based on spatial audio and microtonality and integration with visual Art.

Kairos is a live spatial sound performance built from looping delays, slow evolving drones, and field recordings shaped in real time. Each performance responds to the room it is presented in. The work moves between quiet tones, low frequency energy, and narrow bands of detail that travel through the space.

The project draws on practice research exploring spatial sound, repetition, and meditative listening during a Masters in Music and Sound Design at the University of Greenwich. This led to the development of an Ambisonics performance system called EchoSpace, created for live improvisation and composition with spatial sound across different speaker layouts. Using a DIY approach, the system centres on a custom Lemur interface controlling Reaper, which hosts spatial effects and connects with synthesisers, samplers, an Ambisonic microphone, and other instruments. >EchoSpace supports real time performance and composition shaped by the space.

Source material includes patches created with hardware and software-based synthesis, sampler- based textures, and feedback or resonances from the room captured with an Ambisonic microphone. The work also incorporates field recordings from quiet outdoor settings including dawn choruses, wind across open ground, and small mechanical movements picked up by contact mics and coil pickups. During the performance these sounds form a slow shifting structure. Tones stretch, bend, and pull apart. Spatial gestures evolve and overlap. Sounds rise, fall, move above the listener, or circle the room at different speeds, creating gentle motion that supports calm listening. The result is a sound field that invites people to slow down and listen with care.

Kairos was premiered at the Bathway Theatre in Greenwich and later presented at the 2025 Sound Image Festival. Compositions using the system were also developed in the University of Greenwich studios, with the IKO speaker, and during a residency at Bidston Observatory Artistic Research Centre in the Wirral.

This performance marks the next step in the development of Kairos. A full sphere setting offers the chance to expand the project, deepen its spatial language, and move into the next phase of the work.

Rob Parton is a London based electronic musician and sound artist working as Arconic. His work explores sound, space, and time through synthesis, field recordings, and live improvised performance. He creates ambient and electronic works that invite slow listening and close attention.

Rob’s practice draws on his Masters in Music and Sound Design at the University of Greenwich, where he focused on spatial composition, spatial workflows, and live improvisation. He works in stereo, multichannel, and Ambisonic formats, adapting each set to the room and speaker array. His recent shows include the Sound Image Festival, Bathway Theatre, and a fixed composition presentation at APNÉES Festival in France. Rob also runs Tones and Drones, an ambient event in East London that brings artists and listeners together around slow, reflective music.

This audio work is rooted in the context of life and its connection with negentropy. Living beings, from the simplest single-celled organisms to complex ecosystems, seem to defy entropy by maintaining and increasing internal order—organizing, structuring, and preserving the system’s processes in a state of low disorder. Theta grows as a sound that takes care of itself: it absorbs energy and transforms it, changes shape, moves toward entropy, yet returns to its own center as the foundational element of its acoustic life. Its path may be direct or indirect, but what characterizes it is the return to life.

Within the silence, defined directional sounds emerge overlapping, sliding, chasing one another, and expanding across different registers, creating formal, tense architectures and outlining imaginary chiaroscuro landscapes. In these spaces, pointillistic elements and sound bands form arches of celestial or infernal cloisters, surrounded by trellises that are at times smooth, at times elaborately ornamented. The parameter of time becomes a parchment on which a spatialization is inscribed, illuminating and activating sound events marked by their own virtual autonomy events that whisper, that pass through us, that depart from us.

Daria achieved an MA in piano, an MA in classical composition and an MA in electronic music. She earned her degree in Classical Literature from the University of Bologna. She's main Professor of Harmony and Music Analysis at “G.B.Pergolesi” Fermo Conservatory of Music, Sound Design Professor in Macerata Academy of Fine Arts and Sound Design Professor in Wuhan Academy of Fine Arts.

Two Sparrows is a brief glance at loss, departure, and opacity. It was borne out of an obsession with quiet sounds and the threshold between sound and silence.

Few sounds bow gracefully into silence; some sputter, some crack, some choke to a stop without warning. Technology, especially, is allergic to silence. We are similar to our machines in this way. Cassette tapes cannot create true silence, and neither can many AI models, or vinyl records, or my old waterlogged iPod earbuds.

In Two Sparrows, a single voice summons a fragile symphony of quiet and accidental sounds: whispered voices, cassette recordings, dregs of AI-generated orchestras, the world outside a closed window. We witness these sounds as they become so quiet they break, in their paths towards oblivion.

After John Murillo’s ‘Upon Reading That Eric Dolphy Transcribed Even the Calls of Certain Species of Birds.’

Matthew Caren is a composer, performer, cognitive scientist, computer scientist, and writer. His work explores the affordances and opacities of the technologies that mediate human expression, spanning composition, scientific research, instrument design, and installation. He studied computer science, music technology, and literature at MIT, and is currently a PhD student at Stanford. He is a fellow of the Hertz Foundation and Steve Jobs Archive.

Playper, as its title suggests, is a play on paper. The majority of the sounds in this piece are very familiar to our everyday lives: they are samples or processed samples related to paper, such as writing, wrinkling, tearing, printer noises, etc. These sounds are panned through a three- dimensional plane, creating surrealistic effects (for instance, you could not write on a sheet of paper three-dimensionally!). This piece is also inspired by the composer’s composition process: a frustrated composer who writes his idea on paper but immediately thinks that the idea is uninteresting, crosses out his drafts and tears the paper.

Born and raised in Hong Kong, Matthew Lam is an active composer of acoustic and electroacoustic music and an enthusiast of contemporary music style. His music explores and experiments on a wide array of sounds and timbre with contemporary instrumental techniques and electronics, and integrates electroacoustic elements into acoustic music. His recent interests include saturation in music and ambisonics.

Winning multiple awards, his works were featured in numerous festivals and events across 4 continents, including June in Buffalo (USA), American Composers Orchestra Earshot (USA), International Computer Music Conference (2025: Boston), International Rostrum of Composers (2023: Netherlands), International Review of Composers in Belgrade (Serbia), Paysages | Composés (France), Espacios Sonoros (Argentina), Midwest Graduate Music Consortium (USA), Ignite the Arts Festival (Canada), MUSLAB (Ecuador), Nanhua University International Symposium of Contemporary Music Research (Taiwan), soundSCAPE Festival (Italy), Connecticut Summerfest (USA), SCI National Conference (USA), and Hong Kong Contemporary Music Festival (HK), among others.

Groups such as the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra, Toledo Symphony, Kalamazoo Symphony Orchestra, Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra, Eastman Philharmonia, Eastman Musica Nova, Mivos Quartet, Del Sol Quartet, [Switch~ Ensemble], Mise-en Ensemble, Du.0, Cong Quartet, NEXUS Ensemble, and Toolbox Percussion are among the many who have presented Lam’s music over the years.

Lam earned his Bachelor of Arts in Music with highest honours from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and completed his master’s studies at Bowling Green State University, where he held a theory assistantship. He is currently pursuing is doctoral studies at Eastman School of Music, and serves as a teaching assistant at Electroacoustic Music Studios at Eastman (EMuSE), supported by the Composers and Authors Society of Hong Kong Music Scholarship for Overseas Studies. His formative composition mentors include Mikel Kuehn, Evis Sammoutis, Elizabeth Ogonek, Christopher Dietz, Marilyn Shrude, Wendy Lee, and Kai-Young Chan.

We grit our teeth in moments of tension, keeping them clenched while we wait for time to pass, for another condition to arrive, for the grip to finally loosen. Denti serrati is a piece born from this state: the desire to go beyond the limits of degree and order, to overcome the boundaries of one's own experience.

What emerges is a metaphysical environment that oscillates between sonic pressure and release. The music does not progress in a linear sense, instead, it opens a space where tension becomes material, sculpted and suspended, inviting the listener to inhabit its slow transformation. The spatialisation amplifies this intention and creates a circular space continually tending upwards. In Denti serrati, ascension is a desire that remains out of reach, unfolding in looping movements of sound that repeatedly attempt to rise. The piece is a Lightening that becomes an opening and a moment of tension transfigured into a larger, more luminous sound-space.

Cristiana Palandri is a composer and visual artist whose interdisciplinary practice spans music, drawing, installation, sculpture, and performance—conceived as interconnected steps in a unified narrative. Her music production explores both electronic and classical experimental music, grounded in new technologies and sonic research.

She holds degrees in Painting (Academy of Fine Arts, Bologna), Electronic Music (Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory, Milan), and Composition (Conservatory of Italian Switzerland), and is currently pursuing a PhD in Music Technology and Innovation at De Montfort University, UK.

In recent years, she has developed a personal expressive language through the interaction of sound, image, and material. Her works have been presented internationally at festivals and institutions including Sonorities Festival (Belfast) Sound Image Festival (London), NYCEMF (NY), Lydbølgefestivalen (Oslo), NoiseFloor (Lisbon), and EMS Stockholm, composing for film, installation, and performance.

Slowing down, speeding up, then slowing down again, stretching and loosening the fabric of time and its perception, as if it were an elastic, malleable cloth. Variations in energy become agents of transformation: they draw, erase, and distort other spaces — distant or suddenly near. Abrupt changes in gravity anchor us to the ground, only to lift us up again. How much further can the elastic be stretched before it breaks?

Graduated with honors in the Bachelor’s degree in Electronic Music at the Conservatorio di Musica Luigi Cherubini in Florence, currently a student in the Master’s degree in Sound Design at the Conservatorio di Musica Giovan Battista Martini in Bologna.

Involved in various musical contexts since childhood, I have accumulated experiences that have allowed me to develop a strong understanding of various musical languages. My current field of interest is Sound Design and Sound Art in their various facets, with a particular focus on: sound art projects, studies on soundscapes, sound diffusion and spatialization, acousmatic composition on media, and electroacoustic improvisation.

In addition to working in Sound Design and Sound Art, I have been a trumpeter in two musical groups from Florence for about ten years, performing numerous concerts in Italy and abroad, including a tour in Mexico in 2022, and recording three studio albums. Since October 2024, I have been part of the post-rock trio Edera from Bologna and am one of the curators and acousmatic interpreter of Suonoforma - Festival of Acousmatic Music and Sound Art at the Conservatorio di Musica Giovan Battista Martini in Bologna.

In the last year, I have collaborated with ensembles such as the Bologna Improvisation Group and the Tempo Reale Electroacoustic Ensemble, my works have been selected for festivals such as Magnetica — Incontri di Musica Elettronica (IT) and Festival Imersivo 2025 (PT), Sonic Arts Summer Academy 2025 (GR) and I have released my first solo work, a collection of soundscape compositions inspired by R. Murray Schafer’s essay The Soundscape – Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World, titled PEM! - Paesaggi Elettronicamente Modificati.

This fixed media composition is inspired by the chaotic energy and fine particulate detail of a dust storm. Dust storms are violent, mesmerizing phenomena—walls of wind-borne earth that reshape both landscape and perception. This composition seeks to capture the duality of their nature: the immense, chaotic energy they unleash and the microscopic precision of the dust itself, suspended in turbulence. On a metaphorical level, the piece explores erosion—not just of land, but of memory, identity, and form. As with a dust storm, boundaries blur. Sound becomes sediment. Structure is worn away until only traces remain. Originally written for the seventh order ambisonics —64 channels, this piece can be mixed down to whichever configuration best fit for the concert hall.

Born in Guangdong, China, Zouning is a composer and sound designer whose music reflects her fascination with nature, malfunctioning machines, distorted noises, and the interplay between refined and raw timbres. Driven by a curiosity about the expressive potential of electronic circuits, she is passionate about DIY electronics, building her own sensor instruments to explore new sonic possibilities shaped by physical gestures.

Her compositions have been showcased across the United States, Europe, and China. In 2025 her works have been featured in festivals and conferences such as Sonic Pavilion Festival, IRCAM ManiFeste, ICMC, Digital Dialogue workshop at the IMPULS Academy, and SPLICE Festival. Now based in Chicago, Zouning is in her second year of a PhD program in Music Composition and Technology at Northwestern University. Outside of her academic work, she can often be found in the woods capturing field recordings or at the post office, collecting stamps.

The “X6 – Hexaphonic Spatialized Guitar” project is about an augmented electric guitar designed for 6.1 channel spatialization. With the X6 setup and a special breakout cable, it is possible to manage the sound from a hexaphonic pickup, which separates the guitar signal into six independent channels, one for each string. These signals are sent to a computer, where Max/MSP processes them in real time with filters, loops, sound manipulation, and spatial projection.

The first version of the project had a fixed structure controlled by a sequencer that automated the filters. In the latest version, a flexible multi-channel filter matrix has been added, together with inputs for voice, electronic instruments, and samples. This makes the performance more open and improvisational, allowing for control over time, sound layering, spatial gestures, and vocal or electronic transformations. The idea is to build a self-made hyper-instrument where the performer and the algorithms influence each other, creating electroacoustic music distributed in space and combining different musical practices.

The newest patch, version 20, also uses artificial intelligence. With machine learning tools (FluCoMa), the system can recognize instrumental gestures and automatically change filter settings. With neural synthesis (RAVE), it can modify the sound of each string by acting on the latent spaces of the model, producing deep timbral changes.

The project also includes an interactive audio visual part made with TouchDesigner, where the screen is divided into six sections that represent the six guitar strings. The visuals are generated with AI using prompts inspired by Renaissance painting, but mixed with modern themes such as social distortion, bias, and the perceptual effects of today’s hyper-technological world.

In general, the concept reflects on a kind of “second Renaissance”. This idea suggests that we are living in a new era where imagination is shaped not by traditional art or patronage but by digital technology. This new t´echne opens new creative possibilities, but also brings ethical, cognitive, and epistemological questions that we are only beginning to understand.

Francesco Perissi is a composer, guitarist, and sound engineer based in Florence. He teaches Electroacoustic Composition at the “L. Campiani” Conservatory in Mantua and is the creator of the “X6” project for hexaphonic spatialized guitar, as well as the founder of “match”, a meeting dedicated to electroacoustic improvisation. His artistic research focuses on exploring the expressive possibilities offered by technological development, with particular attention to the relationship between musical instruments and sound spatialization. Through the use of interactive devices, multichannel systems, and real-time manipulation techniques, he creates scores and sound environments for experimental electronic music, installations, and live performances. His work blends contemporary languages with avant-pop influences, placing at its core the relationship between body, gesture, and acoustic space.


Giovanni Magaglio is a sound and visual artist who explores the expressive possibilities of concrete sound, focusing on timbral transformation and the perception of acoustic space. His works shape layered soundscapes in which listening becomes an active and immersive experience. He teaches Multimedia at the Conservatory of Florence and works with sound and video across various contexts: installations, theater performances, and audiovisual productions, including short and feature films. His artistic practice unfolds through a continuous exploration of the relationship between image, sound, and perceptual space, creating sensory environments where the boundaries between reality and representation become blurred.

Lake Nezahualcóyotl is a reservoir in Chiapas created as part of a hydroelectric power scheme. The dam was completed in 1966, and the area around the original lake flooded. Just a year earlier a similar flooding drowned the village of Capel Celyn in Wales, controversially displacing its Welsh-speaking residents. At both lakes, droughts cause the periodic re-emergence of the drowned buildings, with increasing regularity: a 16th century church at Lake Nezahualcóyotl and the ruins of the village of Capel Celyn.

These appearances re-awaken painful memories of lost worlds and past injustices; but they are also a very present reminder of the crisis of climate change, in Mexico, Wales and across the globe.

Materials in the Two Lakes have been shaped using water level and flow data from both lakes, provided by the Copernicus Climate Change Service (EU) and the National River Flow Archive (UK). I am indebted to Dr Iestyn Woolway for his assistance in accessing and understanding the data.

Andrew Lewis (1963) studied composition with Jonty Harrison at the University of Birmingham, where he was one of the original members of BEAST (Birmingham ElectroAcoustic Sound Theatre). He is currently Professor of Composition at Bangor University, where he directs the work of the Electroacoustic Music Studios. His music is concerned with the materiality of perceived sound, and often uses technology in its realisation and performance. He is best known for his acousmatic music (fixed-medium sonic art heard over multiple loudspeakers), but also composes chamber and orchestral music, with or without electronics.

Notable prizes and distinctions include ARTS XXI (Spain), Bourges ‘Euphonie d’Or’ (France), Prix CIME (International), CIMESP (Brazil), Destellos (Argentina), KLANG! (France), HEAR Hungarian Radio (Hungary), Music Nova (Czech Republic), Noroit (France), Prix Ars Electronica (Austria), PRS Prize (UK), Stockholm Electronic Arts (Sweden).

He is married with four grown-up daughters, and lives in North Wales.

http://www.andrewlewis.org.uk

https://electrocd.com/en/artiste/lewis_an/andrew-lewis

http://composersedition.com/andrewlewis

The piece explores the relationship between human and machine in artistic creation, focusing on human decision-making in performance, synthesis, and media isomorphism. It suggests that technology and artistic performance are best unified through perceptual understanding, balancing automated processes with human interaction.

Glass and tile shards were chosen as sound objects. Though not naturally resonant, these materials enabled exploration through vibration and human manipulation, bridging physical objects with digital sound. Performance and improvisation were crucial in shaping the piece's structure, with tonality and gesture determined by performer’s choices and technique. Controlled sound events combine live performance with partial automation.

Two key algorithms shaped the digital soundscape: Chebyshev's Polynomials for filter design, optimizing frequency selectivity and ripple control, and the Sieve of Eratosthenes for prime sample intervals, enhancing sound fidelity. Spatial reference was essential for distinguishing individual synthesis streams.

The glass shard motif served as the primary interaction model, with tile fragments helping define sound event morphology. The concept of linearity guided the overall form, using sampling as an isomorphic representation. This framework allows various media to be projected through vector matrices across different spectra while preserving their essential characteristics and artistic integrity.

Daniel Gomes is a Lisbon-based web developer, fusing his passions for programming and digital art. His current focus lies in exploring computer music, with a particular emphasis on real-time paradigms in digital media, using sound as the primary medium for music synthesis. He holds a Master’s degree in Sonic Arts from the Sonic Arts Research Centre in Belfast. While engaged in his work and creative pursuits, he also served as a peer reviewer for the ICMC panel. His musical works have been showcased in diverse locations, ranging from Portugal to Paris (INA/GRM) and from Germany (ZKM in Karlsruhe) to international events such as ICMC 2018 in Daegu, Korea, and NYCEMF. Recently, he has been delving deeper into the realms of digital arts and the aesthetics of music.

Reverie is an 8-channel acousmatic composition that leads the listener through an immersive fantasy centered around deconstructed music boxes. The work comprises eight sections that alternate between explorations of the music boxes’ gears and chimes. In the work, the music boxes’ sounds are pulled apart, exaggerated, expanded, and combined with other sounds whose timbres and textures are reminiscent of the original. As the piece unfolds, the timbres increase in spectral and textural density, and the associ ations become more and more fantastical. Gears are transformed into zippers, coins, chainsaws, motorcycles, and fireworks, and the chimes morph into rainstorms, all sizes of bells, pianos, and more.

Leah Reid is a composer, sound artist, researcher, and educator whose works range from opera, chamber, and vocal music to acousmatic, electroacoustic, and interactive sound installations. Her research focuses on the perception, modeling, and compositional applications of timbre, which she uses to explore new dimensions of sound, time, space, and color.

Reid has received international recognition, including a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship and the American Prize in Composition. Her works have won first prizes in major competitions such as the Galaxies International New Vision Composition Competition, Musicworks’ Electronic Music Competition, KLANG! International Electroacoustic Composition Competition, and the Gaetano Amadeo Prize. She has also been honored with the Marcelle Deschênes Prize in Electronic Music, Sound of the Year’s Composed with Sound Award, and the International Alliance for Women in Music’s Pauline Oliveros Prize. Additional distinctions include honors from Ars Electronica, Musicacoustica -Hangzhou, and the Luigi Nono International Prize. She has received fellowships from Guerilla Opera, Transient Canvas, Copland House, the Hambidge Center, MacDowell, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Ucross Foundation, and Yaddo.

Her collaborations and commissions include ensembles and performers such as JACK Quartet, Talea, Yarn/Wire, Accordant Commons, Blow Up Percussion, Guerilla Opera, and the Boston New Music Initiative Ensemble. She was recently awarded a Barlow Commission for a forthcoming work with the Grossman Ensemble.

Reid’s music has been presented at major international festivals and venues, including IRCAM’s ManiFeste (France), Festival Mixtur (Spain), MUSICACOUSTICA- HANGZHOU (China), the International Computer Music Conference (USA, Ireland, Chile), Espacios Sonoros (Argentina), and the Matera Intermedia Festival (Italy), among many others.

She currently serves as Vice President of the International Alliance for Women in Music and as Vice President for Programs and Projects for SEAMUS. Reid is an Assistant Professor at the University of Virginia, where she teaches composition and technology to undergraduate and graduate students.

"Ööõhk" in Estonian, or "Night Air" in English, was created at the BEAMS residency in Viljandi, Estonia in June 2024. The piece was inspired by the neighbourhood where I was staying. Every night a nightingale would start singing around 12:30 am, as I drifted off to sleep. Around 3:30 am, the birds' dawn chorus would start, often waking me. This piece explores this dreamtime between, as I'm drifting away to sleep with the night sounds.

This piece was created with 2nd order ambisonic microphone field recordings of my neighbourhood birds. I also use vintage analogue synths and sampled pianos processed and manipulated in my custom live performance software, the Pinchbecker. The accompanying video is also generated from video clips I collected in the same area, capturing the Estonian "white night" and reflecting these hours of dreamtime. The video is processed and manipulated live using my custom software, the Videomasher, with gestural control and reactive interaction with the sound.

Shawn Pinchbeck is an award winning Edmonton, Alberta, Canada and Viljandi, Estonia based electroacoustic music composer, media artist, audio engineer, performer, curator and educator. His artworks explore all things that sound, often in conjunction with other elements such as: video, computer interaction, multi-speaker environments, sensors and electronics, interdisciplinary performance and gallery installations.

Shawn has eight albums of electroacoustic, film and ambient music. His music and sound design has been used in numerous films and contemporary dance performances. Shawn has a PhD degree in electroacoustic music composition from the University of Birmingham, UK. He is the Treasurer of the Canadian Electroacoustic Community (CEC) and President of the Boreal Electroacoustic Music Society (BEAMS).

Contemporary music has faced limitations in its parameters and a perceived rigidity, often leading to solutions involving external additions like visuals or interactivity. This project proposes an alternative: subtraction. By projecting concepts from other media into music itself, we can explore new artistic territories purely through sound, without visual or interactive crutches. Imagine music directly informed by information and computation.

While Masahiro Miwa’s “Reverse Simulation Music” hinted at this, my approach aims for broader application. I’ve created a Unity application treating diverse sound sources (traditional instruments, cello) as objects governed by algorithms like turbulence, gravity, simulated circuits, and generative architecture. Listeners experience these sounds moving through a 3D space according to these rules, yielding novel auditory landscapes. This is “subtraction of media” or “projection into music” – no visuals needed.

However, fixed sources risk “Sourceism,” where a single musical series predetermines processes. Improvisation offers a solution: real-time cello input via a remote microphone feeds the algorithmic system, making output the process. This disrupts musical destiny. The key result is the observable circulation within the algorithm, a departure from Sourceism. This piece embodies both the practice and outcome of this subtractive philosophy.

He is a multimedia artist based in Japan. After studying philosophy at Sophia University, he earned his master’s degree with a thesis on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. His works span music, media art, performance, and film, and have been presented at numerous international festivals, including the Ars Electronica Festival, World New Music Days (ISCM), and ICMC, among many others across more than 35 countries. As a composer, he has received commissions from various institutions and festivals, including the Jeju International Contemporary Music Festival. He is a member of ASCAP and the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States (SEAMUS).

Like Telephones explores the tension between generative processes and composed intention, unfolding as a series of sonic environments in which sounds appear simultaneously intimate and impossibly enlarged. The piece takes its title from an image of communication stretched across distance - signals that feel familiar yet distorted, like voices travelling through systems whose scale and logic exceed the human. Within this framework, the piece plays with the idea of “smaller sounds in larger spaces,” and conversely, what it means for a sound to exceed the size of the virtual room that contains it, hinting at impossible acoustic bodies.

Rather than using spatialisation to point toward discrete events in a surround field, the piece embraces immersive ambisonics as a vehicle for a more bodily, synthetic form of emotion. The spatial motion here evokes sensations closer to vertigo or motion-sickness than traditional dramatic gesture, forming what might be considered pseudo-emotional responses generated through movement rather than harmony or melody.

Much of the sonic material is derived from Karplus–Strong architectures, yielding bell- like timbres that hover between the natural and synthetic. This contributes to an ongoing concern in my work with the “uncanny valley” in sound: the moment where a tone feels almost recognisable yet subtly “wrong,” generating tension between perception and expectation.

Like Telephones was built as a through-composed work developed over many months. Rather than imposing a macro-formal plan, I approached each section by asking how much “busyness” or density the sound field could sustain. This mirrors long-form improvisation but also raises questions about how generative structures accumulate meaning over time.

I’m a composer and PhD candidate at Leeds Beckett University, and my work ranges from film soundtracks and sound design, to performance pieces and installations; I’m currently concentrating on electro-acoustic music in a multi-channel environment, working with higher order ambisonics. Recently I have also been playing small concerts with live electronics around West Yorkshire, and incorporating improvisation into my work. I've also begun to investigate site specific sound art, most recently with an installation, Ghosts of The Mill (2023), for Sunny Bank Mills Gallery in Farsley.

I have been one of the team behind the EchoChroma new music research group performances, which have taken place at least bi-annually for the last ten years, along with Dr Nikos Stavropoulos, Dr Bob Birch and Rob Harrison, and have been proud to invite and programme a wide range of new musics here at Leeds Beckett University.

My compositional interests include memory, the tension between natural and human initiated processes, the aporia, and the materialities of sound as a force independent of reason. My sonic materials include field recordings (both as a sound material and as a process), archival sounds, multichannel diffusion especially with regard to the virtualmonium, and modular synthesis sounds, with a focus on 3D sound reproduction and manipulation and procedural generation of sequence material.

This presentation explores compositional approaches to space and spatialisation in three multichannel acousmatic works. It begins with Pellere (2011–12), an 8-channel piece using open-source software, focusing on stereo sound deployment alongside the development of 8-channel spatial sound identities. The discussion then shifts to Traces of Play (2016–17), a 4-channel work composed with a 5.1 system, examining how adopting reduced fixed-format speaker configurations impacts on spatial creativity. Finally, Reflecting Cau Cau and Parque Urbano del Bosque (2021) uses ambisonic techniques, highlighting unique spatial manipulations and workflow changes. The presentation concludes by discussing hybrid approaches currently under development that integrate ambisonic and channel-based techniques into compositional workflows.

Chumbi is a collection of unit generators (UGens) encapsulated as a package of ‘Chugins’ for the ChucK programming language Wang et al. (2015) that provides higher-order ambisonic (HOA) encoding, decoding and calculation of spherical harmonics. Historically, ambisonic processing could be performed within ChucK by utilizing computationally inefficient arrays of UGens acting as gain values for incoming signals. This led to excessive control structures and higher level processing having to handle the calculation of spherical harmonics. Chumbi addresses this by providing a spherical harmonic algorithm for ChucK’s builtin math library and a set of UGens which accomplish the encoding and decoding of ambisonics via low level, high performing C++ code. At the same time, Chumbi was designed with the goal of making HOA accessible to computer musicians by abstracting the complex signal processing and mathematics required for ambisonics, so that users can create their own processing schemes. With that goal in mind, Chumbi is easily deconstructed to the basic ambisonic signal processors which make up a system, enabling user created weighting systems to accomplish beamforming, highly personalized decoding schemes for site specific optimization, and pairings with ChucK’s AI layer to create gesture driven audio spatialization.

Chumbi is a collection of unit generators (UGens) encapsulated as a package of ‘Chugins’ for the ChucK programming language Wang et al. (2015) that provides higher-order ambisonic (HOA) encoding, decoding and calculation of spherical harmonics. Historically, ambisonic processing could be performed within ChucK by utilizing computationally inefficient arrays of UGens acting as gain values for incoming signals. This led to excessive control structures and higher level processing having to handle the calculation of spherical harmonics. Chumbi addresses this by providing a spherical harmonic algorithm for ChucK’s builtin math library and a set of UGens which accomplish the encoding and decoding of ambisonics via low level, high performing C++ code. At the same time, Chumbi was designed with the goal of making HOA accessible to computer musicians by abstracting the complex signal processing and mathematics required for ambisonics, so that users can create their own processing schemes. With that goal in mind, Chumbi is easily deconstructed to the basic ambisonic signal processors which make up a system, enabling user created weighting systems to accomplish beamforming, highly personalized decoding schemes for site specific optimization, and pairings with ChucK’s AI layer to create gesture driven audio spatialization.

Current software for network spatial audio is limited by capacity or interoperability. Here we have developed a new spatial audio mixing and distribution engine, optimised for efficient processing of many audio inputs and outputs from physically distributed sources. This allows for large scale social interaction and performances in shared virtual audio spaces. The server supports multiple different audio I/O clients, enabling different modes of AR, VR and MR presentation.

The Electropoem series is a collection of multichannel compositions that explore the connections between sound, space, and poetic expression. Each piece focuses on the spatial placement and movement of sound to create an engaging listening experience where the balance between sound and silence encourages attentive listening.

The multichannel format allows sounds and textures to move dynamically within a defined space. This approach helps create clear and precise auditory environments, making it easier for listeners to focus on the details of the music.

Electropoem No. 12 is based on sounds recorded by NASA on Mars. This includes 16 minutes of raw, unfiltered sounds captured by the Perseverance rover as it traveled through Jezero Crater. The recordings feature noise generated by the interaction between the rover’s wheels, suspension, and the Martian surface, as well as a high-pitched scratching noise. Notably, the microphone used for these recordings was originally designed for entry, descent, and landing operations and had limited testing for surface recordings before the rover’s launch.

Mars’s atmosphere affects how sound behaves. Because it is cold and thin, sound travels at about 540 mph (240 m/s), which is slower than the 760 mph (340 m/s) on Earth. The atmosphere, mostly made up of carbon dioxide.

The work also uses the ED2-07 tuning system, which divides an octave into seven equal parts. The scale is as follows:

171.42857, 342.85714, 514.28571, 685.71429, 857.14286, 1028.57143, 2/1

This tuning system, combined with the unique Martian soundscapes, adds variety to the series and introduces new musical possibilities. By combining these elements, Electropoem No. 12 highlights the potential for new approaches to music using unfamiliar sound sources and tuning systems.

Ali Balighi, a composer, sound designer, and sound engineer, was born in Tehran, Iran. He graduated from The University of Art in 2011 with a Bachelor’s degree in Music Performance. A passion for composition led him to pursue a Master’s degree in Composition at Texas Tech University, where he is currently a student for a Doctor of Musical Arts (DMA) in Composition. A number of research and teaching interests align with Balighi’s academic pursuits, which include music technology, open-source software, contemporary music analysis, and music theory. His teaching experience includes positions as a sound engineer, music recording assistant, composition and music theory teacher, and positions as a cello instructor in various Iranian music institutions.

Balighi’s compositions have been showcased internationally at festivals and conferences, including Sonic Matter, New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, Hot Air Music Festival, Tehran Contemporary Music Festival, NoiseFloor UK Contemporary Music, Research On Contemporary Composition Conference, ClarinetFest, Cortona Sessions For New Music, Audiovisual Frontiers Festival, ICSC 2022 6th International Csound Conference, and Tehran International Electronic Music Festival.

As a composer, Balighi has released contemporary music albums, including Whispers of Papers, Noise vs. Silence vol. 1, and Intolerance. His compositions have been performed by musicians and ensembles such as Sputter Box ensemble, Front Porch ensemble, Zenith Saxophone Quartet, Twenty Fingers Duo, SynthBeats, The ____ Experiment, Michael Bridge, Parker Fritz, Anoush Moazzeni, Kathryn Vetter, Hamed Shaded, Golnaz Khalili, Puneh Zare’i Sefid Dashti, Neda Asadinejad, Shaghayegh Bagheri, Behnoush Sabetghadam, Negin Goodarzi, Zeinab Hajihasani, and Ulrike Brand.

Website: https://alibalighi.com

Machinarium unfolds as a journey through an imaginary city of machines, where mechanisms seem to think and structures begin to breathe. Layers of image and sound interlock like gears, evoking a world in which the boundary between living organism and industrial artifact becomes uncertain.

Composer João Pedro Oliveira holds the Corwin Endowed Chair in Composition for the University of California at Santa Barbara. He studied organ performance, composition, and architecture in Lisbon. He completed a Ph.D. in Music at the University of New York at Stony Brook. His music includes opera, orchestral compositions, chamber music, electroacoustic music, and experimental video. He has received over 70 international prizes and awards for his works, including the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in 2023, the Bourges Magisterium Prize, and the Giga-Hertz Special Award, among others. His music is played all over the world. He taught at Aveiro University (Portugal) and Federal University of Minas Gerais (Brazil). His publications include several articles in journals and a book on 20th century music theory.

Hollow Point is a fixed media composition exploring layered resynthesis techniques. Field recordings are split into individual layers using automated processes that aim to separate the original files into musically relevant parts. Each layer sounds “thin” or “hollow” due to the imprecise nature of these algorithms, with artifacts often remaining. However, when all layers are combined, these imperfections cancel out, recreating the original audio. By keeping the layers separated, they can be individually processed, resulting in new textures and spatial effects that are difficult to achieve with the source file alone. Exaggerating these artifacts can generate new musical motifs and materials. These layers also provide fresh input for musical agent software to rearrange, creating multichannel compositions that differ significantly from those based solely on the original recordings. The piece enhances micro gestures and inner structures, making them more detectable for machine listening systems.

Originally from St. John’s, Newfoundland, Kasey Pocius is a gender-fluid intermedia artist based in Montreal who grew up experimenting with multimedia software while also pursuing classical training in both viola and piano. Outside of fixed electronic works, they have also pursued mixed-media performances with live electronics, both as a soloist and in comprovisatory collaborative environments. They are particularly interested in multichannel spatialization, and how this can be used in group improvisatory experiences. Ranging from institutions such as Harvard and CIRMMT to DIY galleries, Pocius’ live and fixed media works with electronics have been programmed at dozens of local and international festivals and conferences in Europe, the Americas, Oceania and Asia, including ICMC, BEAST, ACMA, Festival de la Imagen, Lux Magna, Sound Symposium and many others. They are a part-time faculty member at Concordia and a researcher at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology (CIRMMT) and Input Devices and Music Interaction Laboratory (IDMIL), as well as the Technical Director for the Groupe de Recherche sur la Médiatisation du Son (GRMS).

Doorframes covered in masking tape is a piece that employs percussions, concatenative synthesis and voice fragments to explore an empty space. Warehousing - corporations buying entire floors (entire buildings) just lo leave them empty and raise the prices. At the center of our cities, this creates a vacuum - a space barely seen, barely existing. The piece is not a naturalistic description - it’s a vaguely distorted mirror of the subjective feelings this kind of liminal space evokes.

Mattia Benedetti creates acousmatic music, pieces for instrument and live electronics and A/V compositions. He’s interested in quietness, algorithmic and aleatoric techniques and the relationship between sound and words. His pieces have been presented in Europe, North and South America and Asia.

strung focuses on textural gestalts derived from deconstructed instrumental tim- bres, with a particular emphasis on sounds from inside the piano. These sounds coalesce with additional, abstract sonorities derived from strings and winds, giving rise to sonic morphologies both familiar and foreign. Taking inspiration from the dynamic profile of the piano, the formal development of the work is driven by several strong attacks, the residual energy of which manifests in ever-shifting textures. Space is a primary means of articulating the chang ing nature of this energy, with the shape, size, and speed of spatial movement serving to communicate its dissipation, resurgence, or stasis. strung features pianist Kataryna Kopelevich.

Raphael Radna is a composer and computer-music researcher working in acousmatic music, mixed music, computer-assisted composition, spatial audio, and creative music software development. He presents music and research worldwide in promi- nent venues such as the ICMC, DAFx, the SEAMUS National Conference, the San Francisco Tape Music Festival, the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, and the Visiones Sonoras Festival of Music and New Technologies. He has collaborated with acclaimed artists including brightwork Newmusic, the Callithumpian Consort, the Onix Ensemble, HOCKET, Antonina Styczén, and Shanna Pranaitis. His music technology work includes the Space Control spatialization application, Xenos synthesizer plugin, and various projects for prominent developers Arturia and Cycling ’74. Radna holds degrees from Vassar College, Mills College, and the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he attained the PhD in Music Composition. He had the privilege of studying with João Pedro Oliveira, Curtis Roads, and Clarence Barlow.