Considering Space in Music

(ABSTRACT)    This paper is offered to establish a framework and to initiate a context for inquiry and for discovery of how space functions in recorded music.  This is a beginning to seek a greater understanding, and not intended to offer an overview of practice, or a theory of principles.
    This paper will examine the spatial elements of music recordings and consider how they impact the music itself.  It will examine several recent and historically significant recordings to define broad concepts, and will then focus on a single recording and its use of space to enhance its musical materials and relationships.
    Space in music can be profoundly important.  These qualities can create a context for the song and its materials, be used to enhance musical ideas and the instruments and voices that present them, can even function as musical materials, and much more.  Still, the breadth and the significance of their role in recorded music is not defined or fully understood.

This paper is written by William Moylan Professor, Music and Sound Recording Technology
University of Massachusetts Lowell  (USA)

link  here

Quotes;

The spatial qualities inherent to music recordings primarily function at two basic levels of the music’s structure...These two primary levels can be defined as the dimensions of (1) the overall sound of the recording/music and (2) the qualities and relationships of the individual sound sources or groups of sound sources contained in the recording/music. (Moylan 2008)

Moylan (2008) states that the perceived performance environment (PPE) is "an overall space within which the listener ‘hears’ the piece of music as existing." Then continues to say "The sound stage is the singular area occupied by all of the sound sources of the music, as an aggregate or group.  It has an apparent physical size of width and depth that are defined at the level of the individual sound source: (1) the dimension of width is defined by the furthest right and left sound (lateral localization) and (2) the dimension of depth is defined by the most distant sound source and the closest sound source."

All sounds or groups of sound sources have the potential to be placed in their own individual environments.  The qualities of the environment fuse with the sound quality of the sound source to create an overall timbre to the sound, and also to provide the illusion of its placement in a unique physical space.  The physical spaces can have dimensions that defy our natural physics (Moorefield. 2005. p.xv.), or can be quite realistic; they will impart a quality of depth to a sound, but actual distance location will be defined by the detail present in the sound source’s timbre (Chowning. 1977. p.50). 

It can also be extended to the possibility that spatial qualities have the potential to be or to generate musical materials in and of themselves (Tenney. 1986. p.89).

Table 2 is a rudimentary outline to begin exploration.

Table 2.  Some fundamental questions towards evaluating the spatial qualities of recorded music.

Table 4.  Image size in music

Table 5.  Image locations

The proportion of direct sound (unaltered by the environment) to the sounding of the source in the environment (reflections and their characteristic frequency response) will determine the extent the sound source will be altered by the environment.

Table 6.  Environment sound qualities and dimensions in music. 

•    How is the concept of the song reflected in the size of the song’s ‘space’?
•    Is the song bigger than its space? Compatible with? Smaller than?
•    Is the song enhanced by its perceived performance environment?  In what way?