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Articles
Capturing a Place using Ambisonics
Most of us hear. Very few of us listen. Field recordist John Wills traces the practice of ambisonic capture — from the absence of anthropophony in a Scottish woodland to the eight-speaker studio where those recordings become something else entirely.
Real-Time Spatial Audio Design in Speech Therapy
For decades, the acoustic environment in speech and language therapy has largely been treated as a neutral condition — a passive background surrounding communication. My work emerged from a fundamentally different question: What happens when the acoustic field itself becomes intentionally designed?
“sound AS space” — Interview with Gerriet K. Sharma from spæs lab Berlin
Gerriet K. Sharma works where sound stops coming from speakers — and starts shaping space itself. In this interview, the composer and co-founder of spæs Lab Berlin talks about the IKO loudspeaker system as a genuine instrument, the persistent gap between technical progress and artistic practice, and why 3D Audio means far more than a marketing promise. A conversation about the sculpturality of sound, the future of spatial aesthetics — and the questions nobody in the spatial audio scene is asking out loud yet.
Reflections on The Routledge Companion to the Sound of Space
The Routledge Companion to the Sound of Space is a comprehensive collection of essays and accompanying sonic material written by practitioners and researchers across a wide range of disciplinary fields, addressing both the current state and future trajectories of works where sonic and spatial practices intersect. The volume was edited by myself, an architect, composer and academic, alongside Prof. Jane Burry (University of Adelaide) and Prof. Mark Burry (University of Melbourne), both architects whose work similarly operates across disciplinary boundaries.
From Semantics to Trajectories: Reimagining the Spatial Audio Workflow with Generative SPATAI
What if you could speak to your panner? SpatAI turns "make a chaotic spiral" into real-time control data, effectively replacing manual labor with algorithmic performance. We analyze how this tool uses AI to bridge the gap between language and spatial object management.
Spatial Audio – A Free Practical Guide for Audio Creators
For anyone with basic audio production knowledge, this free course opens the door to spatial audio. Learn principles, psychoacoustics, and creative applications through interactive lessons and real-world case studies, exploring Ambisonics, Dolby Atmos, and beyond.
Immersive Audio in Latin America: Talent Isn’t the Problem
A data-driven diagnosis of the LATAM immersive scene. This article maps technical frictions, the reality of borrowed hearing, and the survival workflows professionals use to navigate a system not designed for their context.
ECHO Project: A New Chapter in Immersive Orchestral Recording
Step inside the orchestra. The ECHO Project offers a rare open-access look at immersive recording at AIR Studios. Featuring the London Contemporary Orchestra, Volker Bertelmann and top audio engineers, explore the story behind this massive resource for sound professionals.
Grassroots Ambisonics
Contemplation on the role and potential contribution of DIY grassroots initiatives to the development of contemporary spatial audio field. The article unfolds through reflection on Ambisonic summer lab — an initiative made by artists for artists, built through collaboration, mutual help, and open exchange. By creating conditions and connecting people across countries, we aim to contribute to the emergence of a new scene for spatial music — one that values openness over competition, and curiosity over perfection.
A Song For Two Mothers / OCCAM IX
In A Song for Two Mothers and Occam IX, Laetitia Sonami and Éliane Radigue explore the transition from analog resonance to digital imagination. Paul DeMarinis reflects on sound, space, and time — connecting Radigue’s flowing Occam series with Sonami’s Spring Spyre instrument, where resonance, drift, and transformation become one continuous current of sound.
Concept-based Explanations for Music Emotion Recognition
Concept-based explanations have emerged as an approach to make models explainable in a human-understandable way. In this article, we investigate extracted concepts for a music emotion recognition model. In a listening experiment, we explore properties of found concepts and show how to present them to users. The article is based on our paper and introduces only parts of our research. More information is provided in the paper.
IAMF – An open 3D audio format on the horizon
Amidst the multitude of 3D audio formats like MPEG-H, Dolby Atmos, DTS:X and others, there is a new, open format emerging, IAMF. Let’s have a look at what it's all about and what it means for the future of immersive audio.
Immersive Audio and Modern Well-being: Beyond Stereo
As a sound artist and producer, I explore how immersive audio reshapes modern well-being. Beyond stereo, spatial listening activates perception, emotions, and collective experiences. In this article, I’m going to show you how and why.
My Two Cents on AI and Sonic Creativity
Francisco López delves into his decades-long work with autonomous sonic systems, which goes beyond today's prompt-based AI. From his visionary concept of a "sonic alter ego" to live performances by AI-driven entities such as PEPA and HARING, López makes a case for artistic collaboration with evolving, unknowable systems. It is a compelling call to embrace the potential of machine creativity and rethink what it means to compose.
SEMA - Statistic Electroacoustic Music Analyzer
Analyzing complex and often abstract forms of sonic expression presents unique challenges, moving beyond traditional score-based methods focus on the inherent qualities of the sound itself. To address this, computational tools have become invaluable, offering objective insights into the sonic landscape of electroacoustic works. But how to apply these tools in real-life situations, and how to easily interpret data collected during analysis?
Marine soundscape ecosystems at risk: a data-driven spatial-sound interactive experience to raise awareness
504 Ways Of Listening is an immersive interactive installation that transforms underwater acoustic data into three-dimensional soundscapes. It reveals the impact of human-made noise in the oceans and invites deep listening as a way to reconnect with marine ecosystems.
Towards personal spatial sound instruments
Whether you’re an artist searching for new ways to work with space and sound, or you run an art center, research lab, residency or a festival looking to expand what you can offer, the landscape of spatial sound is changing. This article is about those changes, the challenges many of us face, and a new approach leaving our Spatial Sound R&D Lab and entering the world — codenamed the "Singing Watermelons" — inviting the curious minds and unstoppable artists to help shape what comes next.
Binaural Conversion of Electroacoustic Music for the AudioSpace
Converting multichannel electroacoustic compositions for headphone listening presents unique technical and artistic challenges. How do we preserve spatial intent while adapting to binaural playback?
Composing Transmedia and Modes-of-Encounter: Navigating Vertical and Horizontal Attention
Transmedia composition unfolds across multiple interconnected works using different media-constellations. This essay explores how the relationships between the works generate meaning, and how different modes-of-encounter invite various forms of perception and interpretive possibilities.
How Musicians Really Connect with Their Audience: The Science of Musical Emotion
New research reveals how musicians truly connect with audiences: it's not technical perfection, but expressive and improvisational playing that drives emotional alignment—measurable through sound, brainwaves, and machine learning.
Systematic Anarchy
What happens to music when everyone becomes a composer? This article explores John Cage’s vision of an “anarchic society of sounds” as it unfolds in today’s participatory music culture. The narrative traces developments from historical experiments to generative AI, all informed by the author’s firsthand experiences.
Hardware Hacking
In an excerpt from Semi-Conducting: Rambles Through the Post-Cagean Thicket (Bloomsbury 2025), Nic Collins describes the origins in the early 2000s of his workshops and books on hardware hacking as a response to the lack of tactility in digital tools for sound.
Examining Quantum Computational Complexity and Entropy in Artistic Form
What does a quantum state sound like? What if the invisible dance of quantum bits could not only be heard but also seen? Here, we explore how quantum circuits become instruments of artistic expression, uniquely combining quantum music and fractal art - two fields never before merged - to generate visuals and sound shaped by quantum mechanics.
The concept of Volumiphony
The 3rd age of multichannel diffusion research focuses on the design of so-called primary forest spaces. In order to specify a terminology that would better define the spaciotemporal metric of sound masses and the geodesic path of each of them in its curved space-time, the term volumiphony seems the most appropriate to define 3D multichannel diffusion.
Creating tonal transitions using dynamic time warping
Dynamic Time Warping is a method for analyzing time series. In my work, I use Dynamic Time Warping as a means to create transitions between sound sequences as compositional material. My article attempts to contextualize my aesthetic and technical approaches in relation to this algorithm.
Ircam Spat: A Swiss army knife for immersive audio creation and performance
Ircam Spat is an extensive toolkit for spatial audio. Running in the Max environment, it features more than 300 modules, including audio processors, control objects, and graphical user interfaces, encompassing state-of-the-art spatialization techniques. Its highly flexible and modular design enables its use across various applications, such as concerts, mixing, post-production, virtual and augmented reality, sonic installations, and sound design. This versatility makes Spat a Swiss army knife for spatial sound.
Innovative streaming with the 3D AudioSpace from Sounding Future
In the 3D AudioSpace of Sounding Future, artists present their audio tracks in high-quality 3D audio. To kick things off, I'm introducing the features of the new audio streaming platform here.
Building with Open Source AI Music Models
We’ve been hearing a lot about AI music over the past year. But several years before this recent wave of audio generation, big tech companies like Google and OpenAI were testing the waters with open source AI music models. This inspired me to build DrumloopAI, a beat generator that offers an easy-to-use interface and pleasant user experience and is now used by over 65,000 beatmakers around the world.
Speculative Sound Synthesis
Speculative Sound Synthesis is an artistic practice, a philosophical concept, and a research method. It is an approach to sound synthesis that challenges conventional methods of sound creation and interaction by interrogating the fundamental relationship between artistic practice and technology. In this article, I will briefly introduce Speculative Sound Synthesis, present its conceptual background, and examine several artistic case studies.
Audio Design in XR: Practical Advice, Common Mistakes, and Techniques
Being a sound designer in the XR industry for over 8 years, I’ve tried many different things. Some worked, some failed. Some worked for a period of time and then the technology changed and I had to revisit what I thought I knew. Here are some of the insights I gathered over time.
Sound as Relation
As an artist, I have always been interested in social and physical systems of order and communication – the relationships between people and things.
The Human Voice as a Sensor-Based Electronic Live Instrument
On the development of experimental interfaces for the world's most complex instrument and the gestural and haptic control of artificial voices in live performances.
Video Editors Are the Next Frontier for AI Music Generators
Legal battles dominate AI music in 2024, but the spotlight shifts to AI filmmaking, where the demand for dynamic film scores is growing. Current AI tools lack orchestral richness and adaptive workflows, but innovators like Audio Design Desk hint at the next wave: intuitive, powerful AI music tools tailored for video creators.
My work with different simultaneous tempi
People walk past each other on the street, each at their own pace. They pound at different speeds and distances. My tempolyphonic musical work takes this as a starting point.
10 Practical Guidelines to Best Prepare for an Immersive Audio Performance
For over a decade, I’ve helped artists navigate the immersive audio world, adapting and enhancing their work across a wide range of multichannel and 3D sound setups. From emerging talents to icons like Nicolas Jaar, Murcof, and Suzanne Ciani, I’ve witnessed many common challenges – both creative and technical. Here’s a selection of some battle-tested tips to get ready for anything.
Emotion and disruption: artificial intelligence in music production
To what extent is artificial intelligence changing the way music is produced? Markus Deisenberger talked to five renowned music producers (Wolfgang Schrammel, Thomas Foster, David Piribauer, Zebo Adam and Georg Tomandl) about the upheaval in the markets, the associated losses and opportunities.
Artificial intelligence in music: feared, trivialized, demonized (part 3)
In part 3 of the Music and AI series, Markus Deisenberger deals with the copyright issue of "man vs. machine" and poses the essential question in the context of participatory democracy: "How do we want to shape AI? And what does the development of AI have to do with the invention of the railroad?
Artificial intelligence in music: feared, trivialized, demonized (part 2)
In part 2 of the series on AI in music, Markus Deisenberger explores the question of why AI threatens to dissolve copyright law like a pinch of salt in the digital sea of data, analyzes opportunities and possibilities for the education sector and raises urgent questions about transparency, fairness and diversity in the development and use of AI.
Field recording at the Columbia River
Annea Lockwood and Nate Wooley began documenting the sounds of the Columbia River in early 2024. In this conversation, Lockwood and Wooley reflect on the first weeks of recording – from Astoria, Oregon, to the Canadian border – and the discoveries they have made in their attempt to reveal the unique and controversial history of the river through sound.
Sounddramaturgien: Everything new with 3D audio?
We present SOUNDDRAMATURGIEN: As a collective, we design performance formats for head-listening audiences - always with the vision of shaping audible space as a narrative parameter. Field studies, discourse, and laboratory situations should lead us to nothing less than a universal theory of 3D audio.
Digitaize – The new generation of musical instruments
Classical musical instruments reinvented. Digitaize is the unique technology that creates a symbiosis between analog and digital and opens up unique possibilities of expression for musicians.
Artificial intelligence in music: feared, trivialized, demonized (part 1)
Artificial intelligence is changing the professional world, including that of musicians. But what do music creators have to fear from AI? Will AI use their work without having to pay for them? Will AI even replace them, or devalue their art? And what happens to works created using AI? Do they enjoy copyright protection?
Student 3D Audio Production Competition 2024
A look back at the 3D Audio Production Competition for Students 2024. The winners present their compositions. The audio tracks can be listened to using a 3D audio player with head tracking.
The Second Writing: On Metacomposition and Overpainting in the Monadologies.
In this article, I examine the principle of overwriting and meta-composition in my series of 41 Monadologies, with a particular focus on the overwriting of Schubert's Winterreise in the cycle Cold Trip (Parts 1 and 2).
Practical and Poetic Spaces in "Still Life"
This article discusses technical aspects of the album site-unspecific and the composition Still Life, from its production in spatial audio environments to its final reduction to stereo format.
Sound installations in contemporary composition
On the symbiosis of rotating sound installations and interpreters and the resulting expansions in sound and space. 2 examples.
IKO: 3D loudspeaker system on paper, artistic instrument in practice
Whether hanging from a church tower as a ticking modernist anticlock, as part of an immersive sound experience in archaeological shelters, or as a tool that can interpret compositions as sculptures – IKO, the world's most compact loudspeaker system based on 3D audio technology Higher Order Ambisonics, is making a lasting impression internationally.
Sound Spatialization and Synesthesia
Bridging the Realms of Architecture and Quantum Physics This article delves into the intersections between sound spatialization, synesthesia, and quantum physics, exploring how these overlapping fields can provide new creative avenues inspired by scientific insights.
The piano player automaton
The piano player automaton allows composers to realize what is "unplayable" for human beings, be it the most precise time structures, enormous speeds, the most diverse tempi at the same time, or simply an incredible number of notes. (Florian Gessler 2004)
Introduction to Generative Audio Synthesis - Part 1
This article series focuses on the evolution of generative audio models. Part 1 explores aleatoric processes, inspired by Xenakis’s pioneering use of mathematical techniques and their influence on the author’s Cosmosf applications. Spanning 20 years of development, the study highlights the integration of stochastic processes, real-time synthesis, and modern technological advancements.
Composing With/In Space: A Light Stung the Darkness
What happens when sound itself redefines the space around you? Two compositions explore this question—one interweaves piano, thunder sheet, and fishing lines, while the other amplifies the viola d'amore’s resonant body into a vast dialogue, challenging our perception of sound and space.
Whereof One Can Speak, Thereof One Should Not Sing?
A ground moraine of erratic thoughts along with mannered and mannerist micro-sermons (in textual form) on text, music and theatre.
An Aesthetic Seduction Experiment Fusing Jazz, Visual Arts and Quantum Computing
Quantum computers are increasingly being explored for artistic purposes. In our aesthetic seduction experiment, we have created a jazz-quantum fractal-film by merging abstract art - fractals - generated based on jazz analyzed on a quantum computer and generative AI.
Technology Case Study: MPEG-H Audio in Soccer Broadcasting
This practical report explains the technical implementation of the broadcast of the 2022 FIFA World Cup in two variants, firstly as a revolutionary broadcast transmission and secondly as a streaming service for a specially developed app. It also shows how soccer broadcasts can be made more efficient and attractive using machine learning and MPEG-H audio.
Proyecto Carrusel - a multi-platform application for immersive art
"Proyecto Carrusel" is an independent research and development project in audiovisual immersive art, from which we have created a multi-platform app for immersive art, in 3D image and sound for mobile use, computers, and virtual reality for use in browsers.
Sounding Future: The path to a 3D audio streaming platform
In this article, I outline how the Sounding Future content platform will be expanded in a further project phase to include a 3D audio area with a head-tracking function.
AOO: low-latency peer-to-peer audio streaming and messaging
Have you ever wanted to jam over the internet with your favorite DAW or audio programming language? Or stream sound from your computer to mobile devices? Or build your own wireless microphones or speakers? Then the AOO library may be exactly what you are looking for!
Playing in the dark: How spatial audio helps create a video game without graphics
Kasson Crooker analyzes the design of “Rocococo Audiogame Fantastique” and creating an “audiogame” experience through the use of 3D audio and clever sound design.
The Creation of “Dance at the End of Time”
“Dance at the End of Time” is an electro-acoustic dance piece using choral samples. Having written the darkly comic “The Garden of Earthly Delights” just before the Covid epidemic, I wanted to make a more positive, joyful piece. The CDP software was extended to create and transform rhythmic choral melodies so they could be modified in sung-text, melody, rhythm, tempo, and vocal articulation, and assembled into rhythmic chordal events.
HEKA: Bridging Art, Science, and Technology to Redefine Innovation and Creativity
HEKA is an innovative project that combines art, science, and technology to push the limits of creativity and innovation. Part of Pina, a Slovenian NGO with over 25 years in the cultural sector, HEKA creates a unique space where artists, scientists, and technologists can collaborate.
The Electroacoustic Craftsperson
By thinking about electroacoustic practice as a craft and practitioners as artisans or crafters might it be easier to understand what people do? Might it also be easier to teach in an environment closer to a workshop and less like a classroom?
Transceiver – a Quadraphonic Piece for Double Vinyl
Transceiver is designed as a quadraphonic piece for two turntables. For the recordings, Aras L. Seyhan and Stefan Voglsinger went to various places and non-places in Vienna and the surrounding area. The release aims to encourage gathering, experimentation, and collective listening, reflecting the evolution of communication over distance.
True Spatial Audio in Gaming, XR, and Beyond
Games that feel real? Spatial audio unlocks focus, emotions & deeper storytelling. Explore the tech & how atmoky brings it to life.
Reading music notation beyond style
Western common practice notation takes years to learn and is best suited to music of the past. Could that be a reason why most people who play music today don't read any notation at all? Is it possible to create music notations that welcome musicians from any style of music, enabling them to come together in expressions of musicianship and composer’s ideas?
The Dawn of AI-Assisted Music Creation: Embracing the Future of Generative AI
The rapid advancement of generative artificial intelligence, particularly with the emergence of services like Udio, is poised to revolutionize the music production landscape. As these technologies become more accessible and sophisticated, they have the potential to democratize music production and reshape the role of human creators.
Sounds just like you: Personalized TV sound with MPEG-H Audio
MPEG-H Audio delivers immersive sound that can even be adapted to personal needs. It's fun and makes television more accessible. Find out here why this will soon be part of everyday life in Brazil and how the innovative audio system from Fraunhofer IIS works.
3D audio on the web
3D audio (or spatial audio) has revolutionized the way sound worlds can be created and experienced in digital environments. This article explains the basics of using 3D audio on the web using the example of my implementation of 3D audio in cables.gl, a versatile highly accessible and free-to-use online tool for visual programming on the web.
Beyond Digital Beats: Quantum Computers and the Future of Music
AI has been making music since the 1950s. Seventy years later, Frankensteinian robots have not replaced musicians. Musicians are still around. Possibly more so than ever. Still, Eduardo Reck Miranda believes that music technology is on the verge of a significant leap within the next decade. But not because of AI. This leap will be driven by a new type of computer: a quantum computer.
Sensor-based Instruments in a context of free improvised music
Free improvised music, which took its roots from different genres of music and developed over the years into its special musical genre, requires a lot of flexibility, a variety of different techniques, and virtuosity from its performers. The current article will concentrate shortly on the history of free improvised music, sensor-based instruments, and examples of the practical usage of sensor-based instruments in solo and ensemble performances.
The quest for instrumental control
Composer Jan-Bas Bollen casts his light on the motivations behind the development of his HyperTheremin, an instrument with which he presents audio-visual poetry through manipulation of material, revealed only through a precise choreography of the hands in space.
On Composers and Computers
The article describes the manifold interactions between composers and computers in the creative process. Not only the computer per se, but especially the choice of a certain software and already a specific view on the musical material turns into a decisive factor in, often interlinked, generative and analytical approaches–whereby strategies of musical representation and the choice of a particular mapping are of crucial importance. Finally, it is examined how creativity can be defined and located in this creative interaction between man and machine.
Transformations
The second part of this short series of texts on artificial intelligence is dedicated to current transformations through AI from a social perspective. We are currently witnessing the introduction of AI in almost all areas of society. The article poses questions about agency and highlights both the dystopian potential and desirable forms of digitalization using AI.
Intimate Space; Binaural Panoramas
From personal walks and conversations to theatrical settings, binaural audio enriches our intimate experiences. Tools like binaural panoramas assist us in creating immersive narratives that transcend both physical and abstract spaces.
Exploration and the "Incantor": Bending Circuits, Depunctualization, and Unblackboxing
Circuit bending defies traditional boundaries by allowing users to repurpose and customise consumer products, highlighting issues such as planned obsolescence and technological black-boxing. It embodies a DIY ethos, bridging handmade craft with contemporary digital culture. This practice provokes reflection on the complexities of ownership and challenges prevailing notions of innovation in technology.
Sound Particles: sonic reinterpretation of computer graphic concepts
Sound Particles, based in Leiria (Portugal), is an innovative audio technology startup that exploits the power of computer graphics for novel sound design solutions in the field of spatial audio.
ROOMS for your ears
How does binaural sound transport listeners to different realms, creating an immersive sensation of being fully present within those intricate soundscapes? The course „Binaural production for sound artists“ offers to unlock the basic techniques and tools for creating this immersion.
tingles & clicks - a hybrid music project
tingles & clicks aims to revive a physicality that has been lost in the years of the COVID-19 pandemic in a virtual and physical music project. Outstanding musicians create sound environments and music that evoke quasi-tactile experiences.
OTTOsonics - Spatial audio as the new normal
Current developments and international efforts to democratize spatial audio technologies in the arts and culture sector are opening up long-awaited new horizons in performance practice. Ambitious initiatives such as OTTOsonics show how quickly and successfully fruitful collaborations and projects can emerge when the possibilities and philosophy of open source are boldly embraced.
Of sonic prostheses and perceptual realms
How do you perceive sound? Can you describe it to me? With some effort, you may be able to report aspects of your perception of sound, but, crucially, your corporeal experience of it is yours only. However, you may perceive sound - through hearing, hearing prostheses, haptic sensations, vision, perceptual hints in the environment, or a combination of them - that experience is difficult, if not impossible to communicate to another person. This is one of the delights of listening, intended here in the broadest meaning of the term.
Sounds of the Future
Experiments with sound and coding are at the core of my practice as a composer, as well as in research and teaching. But why experiment with sounds at all, and why on the basis of computer programs?
Concrete and abstract places
The intention to explore selected places is a recurring theme in my compositions and my sonic field research. What is referred to as a place or space is multifaceted. In this case, the definition ranges from a building site or a farm to an open window and even parts of a composition. How do concrete sounds become abstract, where is the delicate, blurred boundary and its permeability, similar to a Venetian blind?
Relevance of 3D audio for the immersive live experience
Listen to the 3D audio matrix with Martin Rieger from VRTonung and embark on an acoustic journey of discovery. Find out how spatial sound at live events and digital worlds expands creative and technical horizons.
Early forms of artificial intelligence
Shouldn't the next project have something to do with artificial intelligence? The impression of AI hype has already emerged in 2021. I take a look at history and ask critically about the social changes that AI brings with it and about possible criteria for aesthetic work with AI.
Living with urban noise: our outdoor environment and 3D sound
By 2050 over two-thirds of the world's population will reside in urban areas: 7 billion people contributing to, and needing to live with, urban noise. This article discusses some key moments in my work with 3D site-specific sound installations, designed to engage listening in the urban soundscape by revealing interesting features hidden from everyday experience.
