The spatiality of sound in immersive media environments

This workshop series shall enable participants from all disciplines to understand how experience, verbalization, and theory can help us reflect on our creative practice and processes in a constant iterative and comparative loop, and to think of spatial aesthetics as a daily practice of world making inherent to every compositional act, with sound in general, and with loudspeaker environments in particular.

Gerriet K. Sharma, Johannes Scherzer

Experiencing sound and space

Our capacity to analyze our aesthetical experience is a key prerequisite for spatial thinking and the production of space and spatial sound phenomena. This workshop focuses on how we experience sound and space through guided listening sessions and an introduction to various methods to develop the skills of attentional listening and experiential analysis. The participants will gain a deeper understanding of how the experience of space is shaped by its auditory qualities, and how these qualities can be changed.

Gerriet K. Sharma, Johannes Scherzer

Verbalizing sound and space

Our ability to verbally express our experiences of sound and space is the foundation for collaborating with peers and for our creative practice. The workshop participants will learn about various approaches to verbally document their experiences of sound and space to construct a shared vocabulary. Based on the documentation of situational listening sessions, the result will be compared and complemented with existing conceptual frameworks. The goal is to raise awareness for verbalization, its still inconsistent nature, and give agency to the participants to engage in the much-needed discourse.

Gerriet K. Sharma, Johannes Scherzer

Thinking of sound and space

Our thinking of sound and space is largely determining our actions in the production of space. In this workshop, participants will be introduced to relevant thoughts and theories intersecting with sound and space. We will be looking at the spatial aesthetics of sound from different perspectives, including music, film, architecture, theater, VR & XR, scenography, atmosphere, phenomenology, communication, and linguistics. To keep us grounded in spatial aesthetics in sound, we will link the outlined theoretical framework to our actual experience, and to our capability of verbalizing it. Finally, we will outline the implications for our spatial practices.

Gerriet K. Sharma, Johannes Scherzer

Sound in the production of space

Knowing the tools for the production of space is essential for executing and implementing ideas and concepts. This workshop will provide an overview of methods, techniques, tools, and technologies to create spatial sound phenomena and co-produce space through sound. Participants are invited to experiment with auditory interventions in some areas of the building. Finally, we will reflect on our spatial practice and discuss concrete design strategies that help guide the creation of spatial sound phenomena from the first idea to the moment of presenting it to an audience.

Gerriet K. Sharma, Johannes Scherzer

Reflection and evaluation of spatial aesthetics in sound

A strategic and structured approach to the reflection and evaluation of the spatial aesthetics in sound is helpful for both, the beginning and the finishing of a project. Closing the circle to the series’ first workshop about experiencing sound and space, we will introduce methods for the qualitative analysis of spatial aesthetics in sound in the context of experience, verbalization, theory and practice.

Gerriet K. Sharma, Johannes Scherzer

Sound installation art — intermedial spatial composition

Interest and activity in the area of sound installation has increased dramatically over the past decade. Such an increase in involvement on the part of artistsmay be seen simply as a natural tendency for them to fuse various artistic areas within their exploration of technology or, even more simply, as their direct reflection of our multimedia-oriented society. Within this seminar practical and theoretical approaches will be introduced, considered and put into individual practice.

Gerriet K. Sharma

Beyond the visual. Music, sound and architecture —towards fluid spatiotemporal environments

"Beyond the Visual" is a research curriculum for the investigation of spatiotemporal aesthetics, at the interface between architecture and music, in regard to perception and creativity and design/composition. With with architect and space theorist Constantinos Militadis.

Gerriet K. Sharma, Constantinos Militadis

Sound scenography - auditory communication in staged spaces

One of the primary purposes for staging spaces like museum exhibitions, brand exhibitions, flagship stores, etc. is communication on the various levels, including the factual, the contextual, the emotional, the imagined, and the bodily felt. Even in ordinary architecture, gardens, shopping malls, streets, restaurants, or doctor’s practices, various communication dimensions are implied. Also, the sonic dimension of immersive media environments such as virtual reality or 360° film can be analyzed and approached from the perspective of communication.

However, in the practice of staging space, we usually consider the visual part of communication first. But what do we know about communication through sound? What role plays our auditory experience, and how can we use the potential of sound in the context of the scenographic practice, for staging narrative spaces, for communicating facts, contexts, and narratives, for the construction of meaning?

This workshop series brings together ideas and knowledge useful to everyone involved with the production of narrative space. We will address the problems we are often facing with sound, offer new perspectives to think differently about the role of listening, and discover what we can do to craft narrative spaces that involve and nourish our auditory experience in a meaningful way.

As the approach to auditory communication applies to the staging of any space we can experience with our senses, this workshop series is relevant to professionals from many fields, including media production, exhibition making, architecture, interior design, live communication, tourism, health and rehabilitation, urban planning, gardening, film making, or virtual and mixed realities.

Johannes Scherzer

Composing with sculptural sound phenomena in virtual auditory environments

Electronic music, computer music and sound design has so far opened up space as a compositional dimension mainly through multi-channel loudspeaker systems configured as an acoustic outer shell around the audience. The seminar, on the other hand, sees itself as an introduction to an aesthetic practice that composes space by taking it as a prerequisite for sonic-sculptural material, thereby artistically incorporating performance environments of varying complexity.

In the course of the seminar, electro-acoustic space-sound phenomena, plastic sound objects, which occur in certain sound (re)production processes, will be theoretically motivated and experienced in practice with regard to their acoustic foundations and artistic po(e)tential.

Gerriet K. Sharma

Reflections on sound-image relations: strategies, experiments and fears of loss

Image-sound relations in movie, television, installation and video games are subject to this field of investigations. Starting with early attempts of audiovisual stagings (Lescaux) a historic overwiew is established to derive strategies and explain perecptual prinicples, for analysis and practical use dealing with audiovisual media today.

Gerriet K. Sharma

Spatial theories and spatial aesthetics in immersive arts

Within the past 10 years, immersion has become a frequently used term in concert venues and studios with multichannel-loudspeaker arrays, in the context of audio-visual caves, VR, AR and fine arts. Manufacturers of loudspeaker systems as well as the gaming industry are using the term as a feature that heralds a new step in “multi-media” experiences, and academia is claiming a kind of expertise in this field based on years of scientific experimentation and avant-garde practice
This seminar will provide different theories on space and spatiality from the past 80 years salient in music and the arts. Different artistic and philosophical approaches will be introduced and discussed to show that space has indeed become one of the most important subjects that bears a polyvalent structure we can define, compose, defend and imagine.

Gerriet K. Sharma