Abstract This article examines how spatialized sound operates as a structural element, an active agent, and a creative medium in immersive digital games and game-based music environments. Drawing on the practices of contemporary composers and media artists such as Alexander Schubert, Marko Ciciliani, Ricardo Climent, and Jennifer Walshe, it examines how spatial sound shapes perception, behavior, and participation in interactive frameworks (Carrasco and Minard 2019; Kamp 2024; Ciciliani, Lüneburg, and Pirchner 2021; Climent, 2024a, 2024b). Focusing on spatiotemporal sonic structures, the study analyzes how sound objects are strategically positioned within virtual space to enhance perceptibility and construct nonlinear, exploratory forms of sonic dramaturgy. Through the interaction of primary and secondary sonic spaces, transitional textures emerge that reconfigure spatial perception according to movement and perspective. Compositional strategies—linking amplitude to distance, localization to viewpoint, or pitch to virtual motion—along with transformations such as filtering and further synthesis modulation techniques and effects, shape the perceptual spatial spectromorphology of the sonic environment (Smalley 1997, 2007; Tanaka 2019; Ciciliani, Lüneburg, and Pirchner 2021). The article further explores participatory models in which sound is intertwined with gesture, embodiment, and decision-making, addressing concepts such as open form, feedback systems, and game-based structures. Considering the performer— avatar relationship and the game world as a dynamic score, it ultimately proposes a model of sound space as a multidimensional behavioral system in which music, movement, navigation, and interactivity converge within an immersive performative ecology. The article focuses on technical questions concerning sound synthesis and generation, as well as the algorithmic and procedural composition of sound spaces in game-based environments (Plut and Pasquier 2019, 2020). Ultimately, this article proposes a model for composing and performing within sound spaces conceived as multidimensional behavioral systems, in which music, movement, spatial navigation, ethics, and interactivity coalesce into a responsive and immersive performative ecology.
This article reports on the first iteration of the Sonic Time Machine (STM), a project dedicated to reconstructing and revoicing historically significant soundscapes. The current implementation focuses on the former Anglo meatpacking factory in Fray Bentos, Uruguay-designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2015. In this project, our primary goal is to create a sonic time-traveling experience that attempts to reactivate traces of long-vanished auditory environments. The STM integrates spatially localized and dynamically rendered sound events-scheduled by hour, day, and week-to reflect the evolving character of one of the factory's central spaces through the lens of sound. The installation opened to the public at the Museo de la Revoluci & oacute;n Industrial on 5 July 2024, where it now serves both curatorial and pedagogical roles. In this article, we discuss outcomes from its first year of operation, including educational use, the development of a score-based library for coordinating sonic layers, and reflections on heritage, soundscape, and cultural memory.
Drawing on a practice-led inquiry into the creation of my music work Tettix-A' (2022), this study reflects on how creative methodologies involving perceptual descriptors, tangible interfaces, and spatial diffusion systems can lead to an embodied composition process. In Tettix-A', a short field recording of a Mediterranean cicada was subjected to extensive processing, generating a corpus of timbral variations, which was then navigated via corpus-based software through tangible interfaces. This exploration led to the observation of timbre as a lived, sensorial phenomenon, and of timbral-based composition as a perceptual navigation within a dynamic sonic topology. This practice-led inquiry proposes corpus-based timbral composition (CBTC) as a site of phenomenological engagement, in dialogue with soundscape composition and acousmatic music practices. Corpus-based timbral composition is intended to be the umbrella term for the music composition practice utilized for Tettix-A', based on the exploration and navigation of a sound corpus as the main means for compositional creativity. This article presents how CBTC foregrounds timbre as the central material of musical meaning-making, as it invests in texture, morphology, and spatiality as compositional drivers. Both CBTC and soundscape composition position sound as an affective and spatial event. By articulating these continuities and divergences, the study reflects on a practice that explores timbre through gestural wandering.
SEEk, which stands for "Sonic Environment Exploration kit," is an enactive soundwalking device that strives to reconnect users to the world around them through environmental data sonification and physical and sonic exploration. Modern conveniences and technologies have made it increasingly challenging to participate in a healthy state of information exchange and coexistence with one's environment. This article explores how technologically mediated soundwalking can help break down some of these barriers between humans and their environments in the present day. It situates SEEk within broader discussions of 4E cognition, ecological psychoacoustics, and auditory augmentation, emphasizing the psychological, anthropological, and biological importance of cultivating a deeper and more mindful connection with the world around us. Following a theoretical overview, the article describes SEEk's hardware configuration and modular software system. It concludes by reflecting on the state of the current SEEk prototype, along with its significant potential for future expansion
We present an approach to visualization and sonification of the graph coloring algorithm proposed in Chaos: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science (Crnki c et al. 2020). The algorithm seeks to solve the graph coloring problem using collective motions of coupled oscillators. Our visualization and sonification techniques relate a color wheel and wheel of rhythms to ensembles of coupled oscillators. The proposed approach has various interpretations within the framework of several physical and mathematical theories. Being very flexible, this framework can be adapted and used for generation of audiovisual patterns with potential applications in gamification and multimedia engineering. We present a number of media examples illustrating our method and its potential extensions, and exploring the interplay between colors and sound
