Aaugh! (Insert sounds of forehead-smacking, teeth-gnashing, and hair-pulling.) From today's Times (5 Classical Music Albums You Can Listen to Right Now), emphasis added:
Memo to Seth Colter Walls (and Natasha Barrett, and Persistence of Sound Records): so some people actually have more than two speakers at home. And as for "immersive, spatial sound": um, there's this thing called "Atmos," see, and it's actually designed for more than just headphones. . . .
Natasha Barrett: ‘Heterotopia’ (Persistence of Sound)
It’s easy to get caught up in technical details when talking about Natasha Barrett’s work. She uses ambisonics to compose and mix music in 3-D formats. Some of her live performances — such as at Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) in Troy, N.Y. — use dozens of speakers arrayed around an audience in a precise dome that could intimidate an IMAX theater’s sound system.
But what use is all of that at home? Not much, Barrett has recognized. While some of her releases use binaural mixing — in an attempt to get that immersive, spatial sound to work over a pair of headphones — she’s also game to produce a more typical mix of her work. That’s the case with “Heterotopia,” whose title track is a reference to Foucault’s idea of otherness. You don’t need a complex setup to get into it; just fire up your best speakers and press play.
The nine-minute “Urban Melt in Park Palais Meran” begins as a field recording of an amiable outdoor table tennis match. But within the first minutes, you can feel the plink-plonking tones entering into a sonic multiverse — splitting apart, doubling, with different iterations of the game cascading over one another. This works well in a space with dozens of speakers, like EMPAC. But Barrett’s overall conception of the piece — with the audio documentary feel giving way to passages strewn with resonant drones and whipping, trebly textures — makes for compelling drama when heard in stereo, too.
Memo to Seth Colter Walls (and Natasha Barrett, and Persistence of Sound Records): so some people actually have more than two speakers at home. And as for "immersive, spatial sound": um, there's this thing called "Atmos," see, and it's actually designed for more than just headphones. . . .
Last edited: