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date: 18 January 2021

Abstract and Keywords

The chapter considers mobile locative audio applications, in which sounds are triggered or generated in response to GPS data, and it proposes a category of translocational audio, in which the listener navigates a sound environment which has no specific reference to a physical site, but is overlaid on it in a location of their own choice. It contextualizes this exploratory form of embodied interaction within developments in the twentieth-century musical avant-garde, investigating how composers such as Cage and Boulez reconceived musical structure in terms of spatial navigation, leading to the development of open-form composition and later to sound-installation practice. Drawing on Lakoff and Johnson’s work on conceptual metaphors, it is suggested that this development in musical thought constitutes a shift from a model in which music is understood as moving past a stationary listener to one in which a moving listener navigates a musical landscape.

Keywords: locative media, embodied interaction, open form, serialism, spatial metaphor, Cage, translocational, conceptual metaphor

Nye Parry

Nye Parry is a sound artist, composer and Research Fellow at CRiSAP, University of the Arts, London. He has made numerous sound installations for museums including the National Maritime Museum, the British Museum and the Science Museum in London, as well as creating concert works, gallery installations and over 20 scores for contemporary dance. He has a PhD in electroacoustic composition from City University and teaches at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and Trinity Laban Conservatoire. Between 2003 and 2011 he ran the MA in Sonic Arts at Middlesex University where he also did research on locative media.

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