Tony Myatt: Colonizing Audio Space

The TB-A21 Spatial Music Symposium will focus on new spatial audio composition and technologies, based around the “TBA21 Sound Space” installation. The event will bring together researchers in surround sound technologies, composers and sound artists, to present and discuss the new potentials of contemporary spatial sound and music. The Spatial Music Symposium will culminate in a concert programme featuring a new work by Jana Winderen, winner of the 2011 ARS Electronica Golden Nica for Digital Musics, live performances and two world premieres of new spatial sound works commissioned for the unique TBA21 Sound Space by pioneer of electronic music Peter Zinovieff, and Istanbul based conceptual artist and musician Cevdet Erek.

TBA21 Sound Space

The TBA21 Sound Space is a project commissioned by Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary to bring to a larger audience the unique series of spatial compositions that were produced for The Morning Line. Saturated with over fifty speakers, The TBA21 SoundSpace uses a unique interactive multi-spatial sound system, conceived by Tony Myatt, Professor of Sound at the University of Surrey, UK. The novel spatialization software, which suggested a new form of music written especially for The Morning Line, has now been extended to be reproduced in the TBA21 Sound Space, the first of which has been developed in the context of Peter Weibel’s landmark exhibition Sound Art. Sound as a Medium of Art at ZKM Karlsruhe.

To celebrate the evolution of the medium, TBA21 has put on loan its sound archive of nearly 30 experimental sound compositions, which were commissioned over the last 4 years from an international group of composers, whose work lies beyond the boundaries and the programming of traditional concert halls. The existing archive of music and soundscapes have been reconfigured through a specially written software by Tony Myatt and his team to recreate the Sound Space multispatial audio installation. This has multiple surround sound fields, some adjacent to each other and some nested inside each other in layers and provides an experiential three-dimensional sound reproduction system, within a larger scale spatial sound environment.