Also out on empreintes DIGITALes is Annette Vande Gorne’s Yawar Fiesta, a work she describes as a ‘spatialised electroacoustic opera’. Released as a Blu-Ray audio disc, containing both surround and stereo mixes (including binaural), this 87-minute work — dedicated to one of the masters of acousmatic music, Francis Dhomont — is to all intents and purposes created entirely from vocal sounds. These have their origin in the libretto, written by Werner Lambersy, which “takes the incantatory and ritualistic form of an ancient Greek tragedy”. The text is used more as the basis for textural and/or spacial invention rather than for the strict and clear transmission of its content. Tangible words and vocalisations regularly emerge though, and perhaps the key defining feature of Yawar Fiesta is its dramatic, fantastical interplay of both material nature and perspective, alternating between granular, cloud-like, noisy formations (often positioned in the background or periphery) and solemn declarations and intoned chanting, seemingly by a vast, intimately close chorus of voices.

Considering the relatively small palette of sounds and sound treatments that occupy the piece, it’s remarkable that Gorne holds one’s attention so entirely for such a long period of time. Its structural unpredictability is an important factor, as is the enormous range of vocal types and arrangements, encompassing singing, chanting, speaking, shouting, crying (even keening), crooning, throat- and overtone-singing, whispering and whistling, ranging from just a single voice to many, moving like quicksilver between pitch and noise, speech and song, consonance and dissonance as well as shifting proximities and registers as though subject to the detailed rubrics of some vast, inscrutable liturgy. Another vital factor, though, is the extent of its emotional immediacy. Anything ‘operatic’ needs to keep its emotions at or very near to the surface, and while its intent and direction often feel bafflingly alien, the vitality and passion at its core is unambiguous to the point of being almost painfully overt. Unlike most large-scale works, it’s difficult if not impossible to talk about ‘highlights’ and single out particular sections or passages. The entire piece is a highlight, each and every one of its convoluted contours a spell-binding gem that becomes lost (but not forgotten) in an increasing collection of such jewel-like moments and episodes that follow each other in a way that’s almost implausibly organic. In lesser hands one would be marvelling simply at the breadth of imagination and astonishing compositional technique being demonstrated. Yet for all its unknowns and unpredictability, its wild paroxysms of austerity and elation, Yawar Fiesta cuts to the quick, and one is left gasping at the integrity and above all the intense humanity of its musical language. Everything in it is transparent and real and honest and true.

Nobody — but nobody — makes music that sounds like Paul Dolden. His work typically exhibits unchecked exuberance, both his instrumental and electronic (and electroacoustic) music not merely firing on all cylinders, but with their inner workings ludicrously pimped and their processors absurdly overclocked, sounds and timbres piled on top of each other in extremis. His latest disc, Histoire d’histoire, on the Canadian acousmatic label empreintes DIGITALes, is therefore interesting as in many respects it shows considerable restraint. Much of the disc is devoted to Dolden’s five-movement work Music of Another Present Era, completed last year, in which he sets out to create a kind of deliberately inauthentic ethnographic artefact. Dolden uses our lack of knowledge about the music of ancient cultures to construct a free-wheeling flight of fancy, employing a “metaphoric use of myths” as inspiration rather than seeking to fabricate a pointless (and impossible) ersatz ‘reconstruction’. This imagined historical survey perhaps accounts in part for the demonstrable delicacy shown in this piece. Yet even from the opening moments, it’s unequivocally Dolden: microtonally unique instruments — implying the lack of a coherent, codified tuning scheme — wheeze into life as though summoning up their energy only with considerable effort, presenting a unified but ‘doddery’ demeanour. This is how first movement Marsyas’ Melodies begins (evoking the Phrygian Satyr who was supposedly the first to create music for the flute), eventually restarting in order to find some clarity, whereupon Dolden’s characteristic dense polyphony swells up, leading to Zappa-esque florid percussion and strangely agile stodge. Flutes are featured even more in third movement Entr’acte, in which a solid chorus of them is created, so compacted that they constantly clash and jostle and scrape against each other to the point where they can hardly move.

The ‘doddery’ demeanour i previously spoke of, the result of both density and microtonal confusion, continually rears its head, resembling the effect of amateur musicians struggling with both their instruments and their ideas (think of the Portsmouth Sinfonia, sight-reading), resulting in by turns amusing and charming acts of weird articulation that sound more than a little the worse for wear. As such — particularly in The Cosmic Circle Dance, one of the most exhilarating movements — there’s a joyous sense of music that needs several attempts from different directions or angles, crossed with a Harry Partch -like weird and wonderfulness that causes things to unexpectedly break off into a solo, or a twanging group of Jew’s harps. We speak of performers ‘playing’ their instruments, and a quality of play (in all its meanings) permeates every aspect of this disc, as it does with Dolden’s work in general. Yet while uproariously unhinged it may be, there’s an earnestness that keeps the music real, makes it more than just an extravagant piece of melodramatically theatrical nonsense. In a manner not dissimilar to Jennifer Walshe’s equally fictitious Aisteach project, one is caught up in the zeal and gusto that’s entirely genuine and leaves one wishing that these really were, in fact, the sounds from a long-forgotten age.

Comment créer une pièce d’opéra aujourd’hui pour la faire résonner frontalement avec le XXI^e siècle? C’est à cette question que tente de répondre la compositrice Annette Vande Gorne, appuyée par les textes du poète Werner Lambersy.

Faisant référence à la fête du sang qui se déroule chaque année dans certains villages péruviens, Yawar Fiesta est une œuvre étrange et envoutante qui travaille avant tout sur la spatialisation du son comme élément moteur, où chaque personnage trouve sa place à travers l’acoustique offerte par les possibilités des nouvelles technologies.

Annette Vande Gorne donne naissance à une œuvre forte et perturbante, empreinte de culture et d’histoire, qui n’est pas sans évoquer certaines formes baroques tout en les détournant de leurs origines pour les plonger du coté d’une électroacousmatique voltigeuse, où éléments musicaux et voix enregistrées se complètent en un tout résolument contemporain, employant les technologies actuelles pour en repousser leurs limites dans un contexte de performance.

Il est intéressant d’entendre comment chaque élément s’imbrique, Yawar Fiesta fonctionnant comme un tout, où vocaux et instrumentaux se multiplient et fusionnent pour former une matière abstraite à la force dérangeante et au pouvoir hypnotique, nous happant dans une zone cosmique habitée par des hommes et des dieux à la cohabitation suspendue à un fil. Étonnant.

Troy, NY — If you’ve spent any time at children’s birthday parties, you probably know what an inflated balloon sounds like when rubbed: harsh, squeaky, not particularly resonant.

“Rubbed-balloon sound” [used in Topology Chamber 2] might not seem like a sonic texture you’d place much stock in if you were creating a musical work. But how would that change if you were listening from inside the balloon? The composer Natasha Barrett decided to answer the question. She put a 3-D microphone in a balloon, pressed the record button and got down to some serious rubbing.

On Monday morning, at a “spatial audio” lecture at EMPAC — the experimental media and performing arts center that is part of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute here — Ms Barrett’s interior-balloon 3-D recording was played in an acoustical marvel of a concert hall, outfitted with one of the world’s most advanced ambisonic systems.

As Ms Barrett’s 3-D audio file was piped into the loudspeakers — there are 64, positioned both around and over listeners — the sound of her balloon manipulations was enveloping. Smeared textures whipped around listeners’ heads along a wild variety of trajectories. Variations of pressure and phrase-length registered as legitimately musical. Discrete lines of vibration converged, with a triumphant air, before splitting apart again.

But there wasn’t much time to linger over Ms Barrett’s startling spatialized recording. Presenters and participants at EMPAC’s Spatial Audio Summer Workshop had a lot of ground to cover, and only five days to get hands-on experience with tools that are rarely available under one roof.

One goal of the workshop, the first of its kind at EMPAC, was to provide the nearly two dozen participants — including engineers, acoustic consultants and composers — with a rare chance to learn about working with what specialists call high-density loudspeaker arrays, like the one needed to play Ms Barrett’s recordings. Another goal was to present a pair of public concerts as part of EMPAC’s impressive, general slate of experimental music programming.

On Monday evening, the first concert was led, as was that morning’s lecture, by Markus Noisternig, an artist in residence at EMPAC who is a researcher from the Institut de recherche et coordination acoustique/musique (or Ircam) in Paris. His lecture and concert highlighted both the ambisonic surround-sound speaker system and one of EMPAC’s new, and most highly prized, objects: a Wave Field Synthesis system. (These two discrete systems, which can also be blended, were temporarily installed at EMPAC’s concert hall.)

The wave system, a modular array of more than 500 speakers, uses acoustical trickery to reproduce organic sounds with unusually high fidelity. It can also “place” (and seem to move, quickly) those eerily lifelike tones at specific coordinates. Any but the most superficial kind of explanation of how this is possible tends to involve high math (like Bessel functions). But if you had to describe the effect, you might go for trippy and exciting.

Toying with spatially separated sounds is not a new fascination for composers. The conductor Alan Gilbert charted a lineage of such explorations in a 2012 New York Philharmonic concert, from a portion of Mozart’s Don Giovanni to works by Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez. (Boulez being, not at all coincidentally, the founder of Ircam.) But as computing power has increased, digital systems have become more precise and more portable, if still expensive to design and install.

Systems like Wave Field Synthesis can also change approaches to pieces conceived using earlier technologies. A highlight on Monday night was Mr Noisternig’s presentation of Ricercare una melodia, by the composer Jonathan Harvey. This 1984 work was originally scored for a live trombone player and tape delay (with speakers bordering the audience on two sides). In what he called a new interpretation, Mr Noisternig looped the live playing of the trombonist Benny Sluchin using a 248-speaker section of EMPAC’s 500-speaker array, which was positioned behind Mr Sluchin.

Using Ircam-designed software, Mr Noisternig placed eerily live-sounding reproductions of Mr Sluchin’s playing at various points along the array. In most tape-loop performances, novice listeners can tell the difference between what is being played live and what is being reproduced electronically. But this “Ricercare” performance had a suaveness of blended tone that seemed both organic and otherworldly.

So, do you need a fancy hall with spatial-audio bells and whistles to appreciate these sounds? In an interview, Mr Noisternig said that the true nature of such pieces could not be appreciated in traditional stereo mixes. There are headphones capable of simulating 3-D audio — made more accessible by the boom in virtual reality technology — but they, too, provide only approximations of the concert hall experience.

He Slowly Fell and Transformed into the Terrain, a 2016 piece by Ms Barrett, received its American premiere on Monday night, courtesy of 49 speakers in EMPAC’s ambisonic system. It seemed like the most carefully designed entry in the program’s purely electronic portion — her whirligig 3-D designs rarely seeming to be in motion merely because the technology permits it.

Ms Barrett has posted an excerpt from a stereo mix-down to her SoundCloud account. You can listen and get an idea of her skills with dramatic build and textural variation. But as she notes on the site, about the stereo reduction (from 49 channels to two), “Mastering really tricky for this.”

During daytime studio sessions, the workshop’s participants developed their own approaches to the surround-sound systems installed in EMPAC’s studio and performance spaces. Carl Testa, a bassist and composer who works closely with the composer-saxophonist Anthony Braxton, had brought along a vast collection of Mr Braxton’s recordings. On Tuesday afternoon, he was eager to test out the live-collage capabilities of Wave Field Synthesis setup.

Near the speaker array, it sounded as if different versions of Mr Braxton were zooming through space at superhuman speed, as a grinning Mr Testa dragged and dropped the “point sources” of the virtual Braxtons with the click of a mouse. After the session, Mr Testa noted that those effects had dovetailed nicely with some of Mr Braxton’s ideas, like the immersive sound environment of his Echo Echo Mirror House system, in which musicians sample vintage Braxton recordings while also navigating new scores, creating a vertiginous blur of past and present playing.

Mr Testa’s early experiments in the EMPAC studio sounded very little like the spatialized music of Ms Barrett. But it was an arresting miasma — one that raises the question of how much new insight into spatial audio may yet come from composers who are also virtuoso improvisers.

Like the ingenious musicality of Ms Barrett’s balloon experiments, insights about spatial sound may seem intuitive after the fact. But as organizers at EMPAC seem to understand, access to raw studio time and expert instruction has to come first.