ABSTRACT
This short chapter attends to the role of the loudspeaker in the creation and experience of liveness in electronic music, specifically in the context of immersive loudspeaker environments, such as the Hemisphere at the Institut für Elektronische Musik und Akustik (Graz, Austria), BEAST (Birmingham Electroacoustic Sound Theatre, UK) and 4DSound. These sound systems are typically used to create vibrant aesthetic experiences in the absence of live performers and any significant visual element. Such acousmatic contexts, while not conventionally live, use sonic immersion, spatial articulation of sound and the experience of sound as invisible matter to create a unique form of liveness. As a composer of ‘loudspeaker music’ (recorded electronic music composed for loudspeaker reproduction) working within the acousmatic domain, I find this enthralling and somatically powerfully, yet highly fragile as its (invisible) auditory objects are contradicted by the (visible) physicality of the objects that give rise to them-loudspeakers.
