360°
In the mid-to-late 2010s, the tech world decided to care (again) about virtual reality, or — in lieu of a more comprehensive definition — the notion that a person can put on a headset containing displays and headphones that will replace their “conventional reality” (the actual industry-standard term for the living world in front of us, which contains all experience) with a curated one. VR resuscitated interest in ambisonic audio, a kind of surround-sound phenomenon and recording technique with which an engineer or artist (or probably both) can emulate the sonic experience of being in a place, like a real place, where sounds emerge from every direction, in contrast to a stereo listening environment, in which the drums are in the center and the guitar is kinda to the left.
Around that time, Janet Cardiff made The Forty Part Motet and I cried. The voice is the most expressive thing, and as much as we speak of choral music as a beautiful, organic medium, it’s still multiple degrees of abstraction away from a cry or a yell or a gentle but probing question. In Cardiff’s piece, the listener chooses a degree of abstraction, from several options: you can walk up to a speaker and hear a person’s voice in an incredibly intimate way, or you can sit in the middle and hear the whole mix in a way that would be very inappropriate in a normal concert setting.
All of these ideas about the audience’s immersion and agency and intimacy with the performers are hard to actualize in a live setting, because it’s impossible to avoid the impact that the audience might have on the performers, which is not the point. This all works great in a digital space, though, despite the fact that choral music often doesn’t; where normal recordings can pale by comparison with the live experience, the medium of 360° video and spatial audio allows us to create choral music that fits and lives in this invented space.
Kile Smith’s Vespers is intended for a traditional live performance environment, but was perfect for our first experiment with these recording and production techniques. It starts in four voice parts, moves to eight, and then to sixteen, at which point you can track where and when the lines flow into each other and collide.
(Click and drag to change your listening/viewing perspective.)
The pandemic prompted a lot of digital experiments with traditional performance practices, all emerging from a kind of desperation to recreate the sense of connection that we had all lost. In doing this project, we acknowledged that we can’t, really, but that we can still make things for this digital medium that stand alone and serve as a meaningful point of connection between our ensemble and a listener at home. Pandemic or not, this kind of thing will never replace hearing a human voice in a live concert — but it’s also emotionally potent in a way nothing else will be.
