Preferred architectural designs are often associated with particular styles of music. Musicintended for reverberant cathedrals such as Gregorian Chant may not sound well in dryhalls whereas contrapuntal music needs a dryer and smaller hall for clarity of all thecontrapuntal lines. Good musicians adjust their performances to the nature of the hall as best they can. Good audience members seek out the best seats where the balance of directsound and reflected sound is the most pleasing. Generally speaking the architecturalacoustic space (concert hall) is assumed to be fixed with relatively unchangeablecharacteristics. Harmonies, melodies rhythms and timbres change in more or less intricaterelationships while the acoustic space does not change: It is the container of the music.As my experience of numerous performance spaces accumulated I began to wish for the possibility of changing the acoustic space while performing.
I also wished that I couldhear like an audience member while I was performing.With the advent of signal processors and sophisticated sound systems, it is possible totamper with the container of music in imaginative ways The walls of a virtual acousticspace created electronically can expand or contract, assume new angles or virtualsurfaces. The resulting resonances and reflections changing continuously during thecourse of a performance creates spatial progressions much as one would create chord progressions or timbre transformations (changing the tone quality of an instrument while performing a single pitch). The audience and performers can experience sensations of moving in space as well as sounds moving through space. They can also experience therelationship of moving in space in relation to sounds moving in the same space and whilethe space itself is changing. Such audio illusions or virtual acoustics can function as anew parameter of music much as timbre became new in Klangfarben Melodie (tone color melody) - where the notes of a melody are distributed to different instrumentssuccessively as in the music of Arnold Schˆenberg who coined the term and AntonWebern.
(See Five Orchestral Pieces opus 16 (1909 revised 1949) - Schˆenberg and FivePieces for Orchestra opus 10 (1913) Webern.)In my experience as I gradually became more and more sensitized to acoustic phenomenaand its effects on my sound as a performer and composer I began to listen carefully toeach space I encountered. I noted that changes in position and height or the direction of an instrument could effect the tone quality. enhancing or detracting. I worked back andforth from acoustic sound to electronic sound. Beginning in the early 60's I strung tapefrom the supply reel of one machine to the take up reel of another so that the tape passed both heads of two to three tape machines. This tape delay process allowed me to returnthe signal from the playback head to the record head in a variety of configurations tocreate varying accumulating layering, echoes and rhythms. These techniques were usedfor enhancing electronic sounds and for performing processing with acoustic instruments.Systems and techniques are described in my book Software for People: Collected Essays1963-1980 in the article Tape Delay Techniques for Electronic Music Composers (1969)- Smith Publications 1984 Baltimore.
A seed idea appeared in an early work The Bath (1966) for Dancer's Workshop, AnnaHalprin Director, in San Francisco. I wanted to create the music for this dance out of theintentional and unintentional sounds made by the dancers during the course of the