3 & 4 juillet @ CRANE lab linktr.ee/cranelab
https://slovox.design
System as a medium. Space as an instrument.
System as a medium Over decades I’ve moved between sound and image, hardware and software, art, design, and architecture — changing hats to investigate the same underlying current.
I don’t experience any of these fields as separate practices. For me, they are different surfaces through which the same questions emerge : how systems generate perception, how structure becomes experience, how controlled emergence yields meaning.
I love jazz. But the linearity of music never appealed to me. Barely counting to 4, bored by the third measure. Free improvisation, sure, because it’s indeterministic, but first and foremost, I’m drawn to space.
Only when I turned to spatial sound did I realize that my actual material was never sound or image alone, but space, structure, and generative behavior.
Define the context, set the rules, establish the boundaries. The system starts producing outcomes. Not a single piece. A full species.
The practice then becomes shaping the tension between randomness and determinism — tuning entropy and emergence rather than authoring a fixed form.
Both the system and its outcome can be observed, explored, investigated, and reflected upon.
As someone entering acousmatic circles with genuine curiosity and respect, I keep returning to question that have likely sounded here for decades — but which feel newly urgent in 2026 :
- How does the lineage of fixed media and musique concrète affect the shift toward indeterministic, procedural, and system-based practices ?
Space as an instrument A decade on the dancefloor taught me that sound is never separate from space. It is physical before it is intellectual. We orient through sound as much as through vision, more than we’re use to admit.
Through sound we navigate space, much like bats.
This realization led me to studying beamforming, the early IRCAM research of the 1980s, and later developments around spherical loudspeaker arrays and spatial acoustics at IEM and elsewhere.
It eventually led me to founding slovox.design, where I build spherical beamforming arrays focused not on multichannel projection, but on spatial orchestration itself.
In this practice, sound reflections become compositional parameters. The room’s character is not something to adapt to or to reduce by acoustic treatment, but material to be sculpted. The room is no longer a neutral container for playback. Architecture actively participates in the work.
The sound field itself becomes the score.
The space becomes the instrument.
This is the core of my practice: a space-first approach where architecture, reflections, beam steering, and acoustic behavior co-compose the experience. The composition does not sit inside the speakers. It emerges between the array, the room, and the listener moving through it.
#cranelab #PatrickKizny #3Daudio#MultichannelMusic #spatialization #AudioResearch
CRANE lab Research Center Heterotopia, Acousmatic Music, Volumiphony, Action Art & Ethics of Arts