Do You Hear My Point?
Jesse Austin-Stewart · 2022
The field of experimental electronic music for space, or spatial music, has many barriers that prohibit and inhibit individuals from engaging with it. Not only can one&s;s physical ability restrict their engagement with these works, but so too can their economic capacity as well as the compositional and loudspeaker systems that appear inherent to the field itself. While these may be viewed as separate issues, they are very much interconnected. The problems within this field stem from institutionalized practice, which has elevated particular features of musical works above accessibility, resulting in a field that requires foundational change in order to involve people who are currently excluded. This chapter will review the barriers to engagement with the field of spatial music and look at the author&s;s attempts at breaking them down. Alongside creating their own artworks, the author has established artistic frameworks intended to be used by artists when creating works in order to remove or dismantle these obstacles. The author&s;s arguments for foundational change of the field rely heavily on d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing discourse and the way that discourse intersects with the perceived salient features of the field.