Friday’s Spatial Music Performance Kicks Off Creative Challenge Showcase

Posted on: 06 April 2016

Trinity College Dublin composer and teaching fellow, Enda Bates, will showcase an incredible multi-movement spatial music work, entitled From Within, From Without, in Trinity’s Iconic Front Square on Friday April 8th. The work features as part of Trinity’s Creative Challenge Showcase.

The concert will encompass acoustic, electroacoustic, and electronic spatial music in a highly site-specific manner and it will also be filmed and recorded using 360? cameras and microphones for a Virtual Reality (VR) presentation at a later date.

The sense of passing through a threshold into an entirely different space, and the impact that has on our sensory perceptions, is the focus of the third, entirely electronic movement entitled Of Town and Gown, which has been composed for eight loudspeakers.

This soundscape composition is constructed from field recordings made around the outskirts of the campus (the From Without components), which are then manipulated, processed and combined with a sound from the heart of the university, namely the commons bell located in the campanile (the From Within components). 

Composer Enda Bates, who is also a teaching fellow in Trinity’s School of Engineering, said: “Upon entering the campus it is striking how much the character of the ambient sound changes, as the din of traffic and pedestrians, which dominates outside the college walls, recedes into the background as you emerge from the narrow passageway of the front gate."

"Spatial music has long been one of my primary interests as a composer, and I am thrilled to be able to showcase this amazing work, which I hope will ignite a similar passion in others.”

The second movement of the work, entitled The Silent Sister, will be performed by Miriam Ingram. It addresses the historical relationship between Trinity and the rest of the city more directly. Like most of this work, its harmonic language comes from the specific characteristics of the commencements bell in the campanile, which rings throughout the academic year to signal the start of a graduation ceremony in Front Square.

This bell, the largest of the three in the campanile, also plays a part in the opening movement for Trinity Orchestra, Cue Saxophone Quartet, and conductor Pedro López López. This movement begins with a call and response, which is an example of the oldest and most basic form of spatial music. Each ring of the bell is answered by the orchestra with various chords and harmonies that are based upon the inner harmonic structure of the bell itself.

Later, the musicians of the orchestra, many of whom will be positioned around the audience, begin to follow their own independent path through the music, resulting in a splitting of the sound from the unified opening to a more complex, spatially diffuse texture.

The VR component, which makes use of innovative 360? camera technology and new video processing techniques, will add a further element of variety for anyone engaging with the work. Developed by researchers at the ADAPT Centre for Digital Content Technology based at Trinity, the technology will render a high quality 360? video of the concert.

The synchronised audio-visual concert can then be experienced with VR headsets creating a fully immersive, three-dimensional experience. Traditional concert performances in which all of the musicians are located in front on stage are in many ways not very well suited to this new medium of VR, but From Within, From Without provides the perfect opportunity to maximise the potential of this new medium.

Enda Bates added: “Spatial music, in which the musicians are placed all around the audience, is very well matched to a VR presentation in which the viewer can shift perspectives at will. I am therefore very excited to make use of this entirely new medium to document this concert, and to work with such fine musicians as Trinity Orchestra, the Cue Saxophone Quartet, Pedro López López, Miriam Ingram, and my many colleagues in Trinity College that have done so much to help bring this project to fruition.” 

From Within, From Without grew from Trinity’s Creative Challenge, which is committed to making space for creative expression, collaboration, interdisciplinary experimentation and the creation of platforms to explore and stimulate new developments in creative arts practice.