A Collaborative Approach To Teaching Sound Sculpting, Embodied Listening And The Materiality Of Sound

This paper presents recent work in engaging both students and working professionals from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds with the practice of collective and site-specific electroacoustic music creation. The emphasis is placed on embodied, deep listening in tandem with a manual approach to sonic art creation that bridges an understanding of the interplay between digital sound manipulation, larger composed structures and the physical presentation of a work in a given space. Through a practice-oriented approach, participants gain insights into areas such as the abstract world of digital sound recording and representation, the extreme influence on this content enacted by a given sound delivery system and a given space, and the subjective experience of listening to sounds from a variety of orientations and postures, and with varying levels of understanding of the original source recordings. Finally, through a group approach to composing larger structures, participants begin to understand the often mysterious and unsaid processes involved in the normally solitary act of composing electroacoustic music.