When asked, "Why doesn't your sound move from speaker to speaker?" prominent sound artist Yasunao Tone replied, "Why is this necessary when the audience can move around the sound?" A very short proof of Forester's rigidity result develops this position: rather than moving around the audience, as is typical of multispeaker pieces, here the sound itself is rigid. The listener is placed within and moves through a complex matrix of digital oscillators, each producing one component of the overall sound: a series of precisely synchronized and desynchronized pulses, each one static in a spatial dimension but evolving in a harmonic one. This reversal of roles undermines the traditional placement of a static listener and frontal stage that originated in Italian Renaissance palaces, a paradigm comparable to the invention of one-point perspective in the visual arts. This "first person" model of musical performance is still evident today in nearly all electro-acoustic and computer-music - complete with all the baggage of its visual counterpart. (MF/RJC)
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