Electroacoustic music is flourishing in New Zealand. What follows is a personal report on the conference, followed by my reactions to acousmatic music as presented at the conference. The keynote address - Jonty Harrison Jonty Harrison and Denis Smalley are leaders of the British acousmatic school of electroacoustic composition, and have had an enormous interest through their numerous students. The distinguishing features of the British acousmatic school appear to be the acousmatic attitude and sound diffusion. Jonty discussed both of these in his keynote address, which I will now attempt to summarise.
Acousmatic music is a particular kind of tape music.
It admits any sound as potential compositional material, frequently refers to acoustic phenomena and situations from everyday life and, most fundamentally of all, relies on perceptual realities rather than conceptual speculation to unlock the potential for musical discourse and musical structure from the inherent properties of the sound objects themselves - and the arbiter of this process is the ear. An acousmatic piece, then, grows upwards from the sounds used in the piece, rather than downwards from an overall concept. Diffusion, in this context, is a electroacoustic performance art. Jonty discussed several kinds of space. The intrinsic qualities of a sound interact with our perceptual mechanisms to generate spatial implications.