Creating Immersive Electronic Music from the Sonic Activity of Environmental Soundscapes

The interactions between different living and non-living agents and their surroundings within an environment are complex, multidimensional, and self-organizing. Within the context of electroacoustic music composition, this web of organic activity presents a fascinating potential to dictate or inform sonic gestures, textures, and the formal structure of a work. The extraction of these interactions for musical use, however, is easier said than done, and requires a method for translating a representation of an environment to a sound-mappable model. In the case of this work, the representation of the environment used is a stereo field recording, a directional sonic record of the (audible) events within an environment. A deconstruction of this model may then be mapped onto other sounds (or sound generators), ultimately creating a ”sonification of a sound”, a map from a transcription of the sonic interactions of an environment onto an entirely different sound world. Using methodologies at the intersection of bioacoustics and music information retrieval, the author designed and implemented a software system, AcousTrans, that facilitates such a mapping process. Segmented events within a stereo sound recording are intelligently mapped onto multi-channel sound events from another corpus of sounds using a k-nearest neighbors search of a k-dimensional tree constructed from an analysis of acoustic features of the corpus. The result is an interactive sound generator that injects the organicism of environmental soundscape recordings into the sequencing, processing, and composing of immersive electroacoustic music. This work was created within the context of bioacoustic analysis of intertidal oyster reefs, but is applicable to any environmental soundscape that may be effectively decomposed using the described method.