Posted: 04/04/16
Trinity College Dublin composer and teaching fellow, Enda Bates, showcased an incredible multi-movement spatial music work, entitled From Within, From Without, in Trinity’s Iconic Front Square on Friday April 8th.
The concert encompassed acoustic, electroacoustic, and electronic spatial music in a highly site-specific manner and was also be filmed and recorded using 360˚ cameras and microphones for a Virtual Reality (VR) presentation.
The sense of passing through a threshold into an entirely different space, and the impact that has on our sensory perceptions, is the focus of the third, entirely electronic movement entitled Of Town and Gown, which has been composed for eight loudspeakers.
This soundscape composition is constructed from field recordings made around the outskirts of the campus (the From Without components), which are then manipulated, processed and combined with a sound from the heart of the university, namely the commons bell located in the campanile (the From Within components).
The VR component, which makes use of innovative 360˚ camera technology and new video processing techniques, added a further element of variety for anyone engaging with the work. Developed by researchers at the ADAPT Centre for Digital Content Technology based at Trinity, the technology rendered a high quality 360˚ video of the concert. The synchronised audio-visual concert can be experienced with VR headsets creating a fully immersive, three dimensional experience. Traditional concert performances in which all of the musicians are located in front on stage are in many ways not very well suited to this new medium of VR, but From Within, From Without provides the perfect opportunity to maximise the potential of this new medium.
Enda Bates added: “Spatial music, in which the musicians are placed all around the audience, is very well matched to a VR presentation in which the viewer can shift perspectives at will. I am therefore very excited to make use of this entirely new medium to document this concert, and to work with such fine musicians as Trinity Orchestra, the Cue Saxophone Quartet, Pedro López López, Miriam Ingram, and my many colleagues in Trinity College that have done so much to help bring this project to fruition.”
From Within, From Without grew from Trinity’s Creative Challenge, which is committed to making space for creative expression, collaboration, interdisciplinary experimentation and the creation of platforms to explore and stimulate new developments in creative arts practice.
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