Space is the Place: Transformation of Spatial Experience through Recorded Sound and Reverberation

Abstract

This thesis examines the ways in which captured and simulated aural reflections contained on and reproduced from music and other sound recordings transform the spaces with which they come into contact. It argues that these reflections, otherwise known as reverb and echo, represent the sonic portion of experience of the recorded space or spaces in question, and that such experiential spaces may be constructed and simulated in addition to recorded. Their separation from their space of origin through recording and subsequent reproduction through the playback of audio has significant implications for the ways in which space is experienced in everyday listening contexts. By combining recorded space with listening space through audio playback, there emerges a ‘third space’ which does not conform to the ontology of either constituent space, and which tangibly affects the spatial experience of those who perceive it in listening contexts involving headphones and speakers. In arguing for the transformational agency of sonic reflections, this thesis accounts for the ways in which aural reflections both artificial and natural are produced, and the ways in which these reflections come to act as a unique signature for the spaces in which they are generated. It goes on to examine the nature of digitally generated reverberation, and the ontology of the sounding technologies which produce and contain them, and argues for their indexical stability in the wake of anxieties surrounding the instability of digital media. It goes on to examine the particularities of virtual aural space in contrast to the more prevalent visual virtualities, and argues for the unique ability of virtual aural spaces to materially affect the environments in which they are experienced. Finally, this thesis examines listening in the context of recorded spatialisations, and combines the previous subject areas to synthesise an understanding of the spatial transformations which occur whenever an audio recording is projected in a concrete space. I conclude that the intersection of concrete space and recorded space creates an emergent experiential space which can be characterised by neither of its constituent parts, and which exists as a processual spatiality which arises only in conjunction with recorded audio.