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Abstract
The field of music composition delights in discovering new ways to organize elements of music, be it pitch, rhythm, harmony, timbre, texture, or dynamics. But one fundamental component of sound has been comparatively underexplored: its spatial quality. The location of a sound source, or where a sound is perceived to be within space, can be as emotively and rhetorically important to a piece of music as the intervals in a melody or timbres of the instruments. One potential reason that spatialization is underdiscussed is a dearth of language and analytical tools to describe how it is used in a composition. To remedy that, my research consists of adapting Steve Larson’s theory of musical forces from a tonal context to a spatial one. Larson’s theory compares events in common practice music to physical phenomena and suggests that listeners use these metaphors to interpret music. These forces include gravity (the tendency for notes to descend to an established point), magnetism (the tendency for some notes to predictably lead to certain others), and inertia (the tendency for a pattern to continue). These same forces easily map onto a spatial context. In this new usage, gravity describes a fixed sound stuck in a single location, magnetism can be gestures that move towards each other or repeal away, and inertia is heard in how sounds may skirt along a predictable path. By using the analogy of musical forces to describe how sounds interact with each other in space, I hope to lay the groundwork for future research to talk about the role of space more critically in music composition.