Hearing, Sight and a Host of Other Senses

This paper follows up on my continuing research on a compositional method based on the interpretation of information received through all senses as gestural and textural activity in the aural domain; it attempts to map our experiences from a number of sensory systems to the aural space.

The paper starts from the method I followed when creating my latest composition, as a case study for this approach, where I employed multisensory walks to gather gestural and textural information. Gesture implies a motion, a temporal structure, whereas texture implies a consistency, the feel and appearance of something. The construction of the piece involved mapping sensory experiences on a relative timeline on separate soundmaps, smellmaps, touchmaps, tastemaps and sightmaps. Composite layers of that information were combined with recognisable sounds from the environmental recordings I made during the walks, to form musically meaningful structures.

This system of interpreting information explores interrelationships between music, time perception, memory and the listening environment, as it is based on a number of multisensory walks with senses acting on different timescales. This process allows us to use creatively information that we receive from other senses, often neglected when thinking about sound.