Elemental Chemistry Textons and a Vision of Space in Acousmatic Music
Erik Nyström, United Kingdom · 2010
The electroacoustic work Elemental Chemistry was realised as part of the author’s research in spatial texture, a subject dealing with the perceived modes of organisation and patterning among textural morphologies in perceived space. This paper offers an insight into the aesthetic concerns that guided the process of composing this work, while simultaneously introducing some key theoretical aspects of the research. With Denis Smalley’s theoretical framework of space-form (2007) as a point of departure, the research introduces some approaches towards textural scale in spatial percepts of electroacoustic music. This involves the concept of textons, invented in visual texture perception research by experimental psychologist and neuroscientist Bela Julesz (1983). Following the conjecture that spatial aspects of acousmatic music often have a multi-sensory effect on the listening experience, the notion of textons is here extrapolated into the domain of music. Textons can be thought of as the quasi-visual, ‘perceptual atoms’ of spatial texture and are described here in terms of shapes, locality and propagation through time. The discussion puts the research topic into the perspective of Elemental Chemistry as a work exploring these ideas, and reflects on the degree to which it is successful in doing so.