New Adventures in Sound

Introduction to Sound Travels

Since November 1998, New Adventures in Sound has facilitated Sound Travels residencies for over twenty composers across Canada and in Europe. It has also presented lectures, concerts, public workshops and installations in partnership with many leading contemporary arts institutions, such as the Danish Institute for Electroacoustic Music, Logos Foundation, Banff Centre for the Arts, and the Western Front to name just a few. In the summer of 2000, Sound Travels launched an annual summer outdoor concert series at the Gibraltar Point Centre for the Arts on Hanlan's Point in Toronto.

The foundation for Sound Travels is the polyphonic diffusion of electroacoustic music. Which means that a composer can automate or compose the independent spatial placement and movement of up to 8 channels (or vertical layers) of a composition. Previously, conventional practice had it that composers had to manually project into space only 2 channels of information with very minimal advance preparation. The complexities and musical possibilities of 8-channel diffusion are such that composers prepare their diffusion (or spatialization) over a residency period lasting from a week to a month. This insures the listening experience to be more naturalistic and musically vigorous. With the addition of the aXi0 to the Sound Travels diffusion arsenal, composers can marry the vertical complexity provided by automation with a control interface that has the highly sensitive tactile responsiveness of a musical instrument.

When one listens to the world one finds many types of sounds emerging from many directions at once with different levels of meaning. The world of sound is complex and latent with many undiscovered possibilities. Among which is the new frontier of 8-channel sound - a place where New Adventures in Sound welcomes audiences of the twenty-first Century with all of their wit, curiosity and imagination.