Reviewed by D. J. Malinowski
?ta, Gunma Prefecture, Japan

The third annual Cube Fest took place in Blacksburg, Virginia, from August 9 to 12. It was jointly presented by the Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology and the Moss Arts Center at Virginia Tech, and organized by artistic director Eric Lyon, technical director Tanner Upthegrove, project manager Donnie Bales, and Ruth Waalkes, executive director of the Moss Arts Center. The festival consisted of twelve concerts (four that repeated) and two presentations, all of which were easily attended due to the modular schedule. It brought in composers, performers, engineers, theater artists, and video game designers from all over the world, including Israel, England, China, Iran, Russia, Canada, Argentina, and the United States, which was represented with attendees from ten states. Cube Fest has three stated goals: 1) furthering and sharing spatial audio research in the Cube, 2) sharing innovative music experiences with the public, and 3) fostering an international community centered around 21st-century spatial music and new performance practices. Additionally, in celebration of Ableton Live’s upgrade from stereo output to 64-channel output, a theme of this year’s Cube Fest was beat-oriented music, though many other styles were also present at the festival.

The first concert, entitled Research ReSounds, offered a diverse palette of styles, meeting the goals of the festival. It took place in the Cube, which is a four-story black box theater with a 149.6 speaker system, a motion capture system, a 360-degree cyclorama, and the ability to support up to four interacting virtual reality headsets. This concert displayed works created by participants of the Spatial Music Workshop, which took place over a five-day residency exploring massively multichannel compositional practices at the Cube, the Perform Studio (with a 24.4 speaker system), and the Digital Interactive Sound and Intermedia Studio (DISIS) Lab (equipped with a 16.2 speaker system).

Although each piece was spatially innovative and intellectually stimulating, I will focus on two provocative works. Yvette Janine Jackson’s Destination Freedom is an intense sound opera that immerses the listener in the slaves’ journey from Africa to America. One of the innovative spatialization techniques she utilized involved negative sonic space. Sounds of air were projected from individual speakers, spread out over the high-density loudspeaker array so that it sounded like there was a physical wall with small windows, spread out, through which the air sounds flowed. Jackson also effectively utilized the high ceiling speakers of the Cube by running water sounds from those speakers, which made it seem like the audience was deep in the belly of a ship, under the surface level of the sea. The audience seemed to be deeply impacted by this sonic realism.

Lee Gilboa’s In(n/H)er Head uses Head-Related Transfer Functions (HRTF) to transform the Cube into a human head, complete with outer and inner voices. The outer voices represented societal pressure, while the inner voices represented a person’s thoughts. This sonically constructed head had different orientations throughout the piece. The subtle spatial spilling and noticeable filtering (produced artificially in the digital domain and then accentuated in various ways by the audience’s natural HRTF) reflected this attribute. Also, the composer’s body language and thoughtful improvisation made it clear that she was using the 40’ x 40’ hemisphere of speakers as her primary means of expression. This piece used the HRTF in order to contrast the warped sound representing the meaning of society’s truths for the individual, with the unfazed sound representing the meaning of the individual’s truths.

On the second day, Paul Koonce used his specialized 24-speaker setup to give a performance-lecture on wave field synthesis in the Perform Studio. He described the benefits of wave field synthesis as compared to those of the traditional multichannel paradigm, how to produce and playback sound for wave field synthesis, and various expressive parameters, including localization, orientation of directional sound, and characteristics of reverb such as multichannel impulse response, the wet to dry mix, decay rate, and the shape of the room. He also discussed several unnatural but salient characteristics of reverb, such as walls with different impulse responses, sequence of wall reflections, and the rotation of the room itself. Resourcefully, most of this presentation was given by a video with audio played back through the wave field synthesis system. As one might expect, some of the audience members fully understood the material while others seemed to be thrown off by the complex concepts. In order to further demonstrate the capabilities of his spatialization paradigm, Koonce played his pieces Rotorelief and Sisyphus in Situ.

Later, during the second day of the festival, the Sounds in Focus concert took place in the Perform Studio. This program of fixed media made use of the intimate, dry space. I will discuss a few notable works from the program. Pinda Ho’s To Seek in Circularity is a very quiet and intricate collage of textural personalities. The sense of quietness was furthered dampened by the sound absorption of the Perform Studio, leaving audible the audience’s incidental sounds, which became part of the piece. In addition to this, Ho also uses negative sonic space. For example, towards the end of the piece, an insect is heard scampering along the perimeter of the room, which causes the audience to perceive a persisting wall wherever the bug has crawled.

The last piece on the program, Robert McClure’s in excess, was very successful in representing its stance against excessive plastic waste. McClure fully controlled his sound material, which was high quality and communicative of the piece’s message. The excess of plastic was emphasized through propagating sounds of plastic packaging, and the panning of multiple plastic packaging sounds in a manner similar to image widening. Later, the sounds of plastic panned around the room, rhythmically looping to sound like various sea creatures that are devastated by ocean pollution. Toward the end of the piece, sounds became increasingly distorted and transient-like through strategic looping, until they suddenly vanished as the piece ended, symbolizing the silencing of humanity brought about by the pollution it created.
Later that evening, Anne & Elizabeth with Irish electroacoustic composer Linda Buckley presented The Moon in Her Fan: Imagining Texas Gladden, a concert of electrified Appalachian music, poetry, and storytelling to celebrate the life of legendary folksinger Texas Gladden. Featured in the concert was Texas Gladden’s granddaughter, Vicki Miller. This emotionally powerful experience used spatialization to facilitate a reflection of Appalachia, and included minimalist video, ambient audio, ritualistic theater, intricate fiddle playing, a few traditional folk songs, poetry with stutter delay, and painting. This certainly met Cube Fest’s goal of fostering local community, and did so in a forthright, respectful way.

On the morning of the third day of Cube Fest, Ben Casey and Christopher Willits gave a workshop on Ableton Live’s new multichannel features, specifically the Envelop Spatial Tools. These tools allow one to spatialize sound using, according to Willits, “improper ambisonics,” pertinent to electronic music, which usually includes unrealistic sounds. The tools discussed included the E4L Source Panner, E4L B-Format Convolution Reverb, E4L Multi-Delay, E4L Spinner, E4L Deconvolver, and more. Willits also gave a brief history of Max and Ableton, as well as the benefits of each program and how Max for Live incorporates the best of both. Additionally, Willits described his personal spatialization techniques, which include a mixture of photographic space and energy fields. By way of illustration he played his piece Comet.

That evening, Willits gave an immersive performance of his works in the Cube. He intuitively and meditatively spatialized major and minor ninth chords, as well as sounds from nature (rain, water splashing, fire, birds), so that they were perceived as moving throughout the space inside the Cube. During the later part of the concert, he began to position sounds statically in a few particular places, which made me perceive my location and orientation in relation to those fixed positions, as if they were landmarks on a map that I was reading. Several audience members left during this concert, and a child cried (the low frequencies may have been too loud) but many others in the audience enjoyed this deep listening experience.
The Sounds in Space concert took place in the Cube later that night. All fixed media works, it included sounds of pounding heartbeats with turbulently panned sounds in Berloga by Dmitri Mazurov, spatialized and delayed harp plucking in …the liquid mountains in the sky… by Christopher Coleman, spatial and sonic palindromes of melodies in unconventional harmonic contexts in Seven by Niloufar Iravani, a sonically realized, busy traffic intersection in City of a Hundred Bell Towers Ville Aux Cent Clochers by David Ledoux, intricate sonification of building usage in Ritual by Elizabeth Hoffman, and the muddled aftermath of an abusive voicemail in Unrequited by Jacob Elkin.

The fourth day of the festival featured the Sounds in Motion concert in the Cube. The majority of works from this concert involved performers who determined the spatialization live. I will discuss two pieces of note. Eric Lyon’s Curtains ‘space-strates’ (a variation of ‘orchestrates’ coined by Margaret Schedel) projected harmonies across the loudspeaker array, constantly morphing them to new space-strations, which produced a strange, poignant psychoacoustic quality. Lyon also used changes in space to accentuate rhythms, and vertically split the sound to introduce a spatially-invigorated jungle beat. Federico Camara Halac’s Untitled was captivating in its raw approach to spatial music. Dry, glitchy sounds, including clicks, were pointillistically placed in time and space, sometimes darting across the speaker array, while the visuals showed words appearing and collapsing. Unfortunately, the piece ended prematurely when the composer’s Pure Data patch crashed. However, upon reflection this was a refreshingly different way to end a concert, and suited the glitch aesthetic of the piece.

Dustin Wong and Takako Minekawa performed a concert of beat-oriented music with psychedelic visuals later that evening. They used voice, guitar, and keyboards, as well as a large collection of pedals to process and loop the sounds into psychedelic, stratified textures. Most of the spatialization involved panning or projections from different speakers for each note. An interesting psychological, spatial phenomenon occurred during the middle of the set, when high frequency singing was placed spatially high while the drums and guitar were placed spatially low. The singing seemed to me like the fresh air that one senses while inside a hole. The performers, it is worth noting, had great control over the rhythms and timbres.

The last concert of Cube Fest was a spatial diffusion of the 5.1 mix of David Bowie’s well-known album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Spatialization was used to accentuate rhythms e.g., the rimshot on beat 2 in Five Years is spatially distant from the rest of the drum set,  as an expressive parameter of the instruments, e.g., the saxophone solo is expressively panned in Five Years, to emphasize spatial characteristics of the original 5.1 mix - the reverberant arena rock of Starman, and to add additional dimensions to the music. This spatialization of a classic rock album is a Cube Fest tradition, a feel-good festival ending not unlike Joseph Haydn’s feel-good coat-and-hat finales. Audience members were moving their heads to the music, and a few were even dancing. Cube Fest 2018 met all of its goals and was an enlightening and inspiring experience. I look forward to the next one.