(October 25 to December 15, 1999)

Sound Travels through Northern Europe!

For seven weeks Sound Travels presented 8-channel electroacoustic music through a series of workshops, residencies, lectures, and concerts in Northern Europe.

The tour started at the Logos Foundation in Ghent (Belgium). They played host to residencies for composers and sound artists Kris De Baerdemacker, Dirk Veulemans and Moniek Darge from Belgium and Heinz Weber from Germany. The composers realized or adapted recent electroacoustic and soundscape works for 8-channel diffusion using the Richmond Sound Design Audiobox. The tour concluded with another residency at the Danish Institute for Electroacoustic Music (DIEM) in Aarhus featuring works by Birgitte Alsted, Ivar Frounberg, Joergen Teller, and Hans Peter Stubbe Teglbjærg. The residencies ended with concerts at the Logos Foundation on November 13 and DIEM on December 14.

The diffusion technique used in Sound Travels is based upon an 8 x 8 digital mixing matrix, where eight inputs can be distributed to any of the eight loudspeaker channels. By surrounding the audience with the eight loudspeakers, the listening experience is more intimate, visceral, and life-like then traditional stereo diffusion techniques generally permit. The programmable nature of the matrix, known as the Richmond Sound Design Audiobox, along with the touring infrastructure of Sound Travels insures that the works realized by composers during a residency can be repeated in multiple venues worldwide. The complexities of the system and the focused work period devoted to the diffusion enhance the significance of the spatial perimeter in music. In fact, space is a primary component to any music presented in Sound Travels concerts, as it challenges a composer's listening and structural sense and impacts on the emotional experience of the audience.

Although the Audiobox was primarily designed for high end theatrical show control, its open-ended nature and rigorous design withstands the challenging spatialization demands of electroacoustic composers. Thanks to the close relationship with Third Monk Software, whose Macintosh program ABControl acts as the user interface, the Audiobox provides a number of interactive software tools for specifying the movement of sound in a multi-channel listening environment.

The Sound Travels Repertoire was also used in a number of public lectures and demonstrations of 8-channel diffusion: