Studies on canvas (2004) electroacoustic installation.

Commissioned: Sonic Arts Network Premiere: Sonic Arts Network Conference 2004, Leicester: 13.6.04. Further performances: Supersonic Festival, Birmingham (2004); CBSO Centre, Birmingham (2005); Basel (2005); EMS, Leicester (2007). Recognition: Mention, 'Quadrivium' category, 34e Concours Internationaux de Musique et d'Art Sonore Electroacoustiques de Bourges 2007. Research summary: Studies on Canvas is a fixed-medium installation comprising 30 flat-panel speakers in a 6x5 grid behind a blank canvas. The canvas operates as a physical acousmatic curtain obscuring a series of sonic ‘images’. The work is thus concerned with visual/aural metaphor: as with a painting, the images represent landscapes, scenes, (moving) still-lifes, and the (sometimes imaginary) inner detail of objects. They rely heavily on referential material and spatio-behavioral emulation in their realisation. The listener is invited to engage with the work as with a painting, standing back to see the full picture, standing closer to appreciate the inner spatial/textural detail. While the ‘frame’ represented by the canvas abstracts the material from its purported context, in many ways the idea is to transcend it altogether, creating a virtual window on the real, with the canvas contents being often practically indistinguishable from reality. The work therefore represents preliminary exploration of, and has prompted extensive further enquiry into the issues explored in ‘Fabricating aural landscapes: the referential and trompe l’oreille in multi-channel installation contexts’ (EMS07, http://www.ems-network.org/spip.php?article289) and ‘Fabricating aural landscapes: some compositional implications of trompe l’oreille’ (ICMC 2007, Copenhagen). The work also emerges from research to develop electroacoustic composition and performance practice, in particular means of staging sonic works that embrace acousmatic compositional methodologies and aesthetics (e.g. referentiality and anecdotal play with recorded materials, transformation, spatilisation) without requiring presentation within the concert hall. Finally, realisation of the work required the development of software tools to enable spatialisation, montage and sequencing of materials (see supplemental information: http://www.mti.dmu.ac.uk/~peterb/outcome1.html#software)