3 & 4 juillet @ CRANE lab linktr.ee/cranelab
https://sillyconductor.com
Re-naturalizing the loudspeaker: notes toward an eco-centric outdoor acousmonium
In October 2021, near the Bega river in Timișoara, I built a 9 channel outdoor acousmonium — panels with transducers, speakers placed directly on the ground, horns on a small mound, a series of postcards inspired by the landscape spread on the grass for the taking. I didn't theorize it then. I'm only realizing now, returning to the concept, that the instinct was already pointing at what I think this round table is asking.
“Re-naturalizing” loudspeaker listening usually gets framed as a question about us — how to relieve the cognitive fatigue of stereo, how to restore verticality, how to make the listening human-comfortable. But the human auditory system evolved inside a world that included other listeners. A loudspeaker in the open air is never only addressing a human audience: it's broadcasting into an ecosystem of birds, insects, and small mammals who have spent the last century trying to escape exactly this kind of acoustic intrusion. Urban birds now sing higher and louder. Some shift their songs to the middle of the night. Whales have raised their calls by two-thirds of an octave in a single human lifetime. Any “re-naturalized” installation that ignores this is, ecologically speaking, just another leaf-blower with better intentions.
So the proposal I'd like to put forward is an outdoor acousmonium designed to be a careful guest rather than a host. Heterogeneous voices, in the GRM tradition — but each voice chosen for its ecological footprint as much as its sonic character. Distributed-mode panels grown from reishi mycelium replace the plywood box: the speaker composts when the work ends. Parametric ultrasonic speakers act as the soloists — a beam of sound audible only to a listener standing in one specific spot, the trees overhead never hearing it. Small drivers half-buried in the earth couple their low frequencies into the ground itself, no large cabinets needed. Surface transducers turn an existing fence, a derelict wall, a bench into resonators, so the site's own materials become voices. A single canopy-mounted panel aimed upward into the foliage uses the leaves as a stochastic diffuser, restoring the vertical dimension stereo flattens. The maximum SPL is set below the threshold where local birds would involuntarily raise their voices. A microphone listens continuously to the resident biophony, and the installation ducks automatically whenever a bird sings nearby. Dawn and dusk choruses are programmed silence. What the system curates is a kind of layered conversation with the site: Landsat NDVI as a 40-year drone, climate data made audible only at specific locations, gathering inspiration on the spot, using available data for sonification. The orchestration logic borrows from Bernie Krause's acoustic niche hypothesis: each layer occupies a frequency-time slot that the existing biophony has already vacated under urban pressure. We sing in the bands the cars stole, not in the bands the birds have escaped to. I am actually genuinely curious to create and listen to a system that only plays between 80hz and 8khz.
The deepest claim, and the one I want to put on the table, is this: re-naturalizing the loudspeaker is not about making the playback more lifelike. It's about reducing the number of abstractions between the wavefront and the ear — letting the listener's own pinna and body do the spatial decoding, letting the wind and the leaves and the ground take back their roles as diffusers and filters. I initially thought about suggesting high tech drivers with impressive transient response, like the Manger transducer. But then I thought a heterogeneous outdoor acousmonium that knows when to be quiet is, I think, the most honest “espace monde” we can offer right now — because it admits that the world it claims to address was already full of listeners before we arrived.
#cranelab #CătălinMatei #acousmonium #acousmatic #MultichannelMusic #spatialization #AudioResearch
CRANE lab Research Center Heterotopia, Acousmatic Music, Volumiphony, Action Art & Ethics of Arts