Pietro Trallori

Acousmates – The soundscape in the Acousmatic Space [2025]

The term ‘acousmates’, referring to natural sounds of unknown origin, endows the soundscape with its own intrinsic ‘acusmatic quality’. This opens up new artistic perspectives that interweave studies of the soundscape, music, the acousmatic space and soundscape composition.

In the fourth volume of the Spectres series (Spectres #04 – A Thousand Voices, 2023), published by Shelter Press in collaboration with the INA-GRM in Paris, GRM director François J. Bonnet explores the theme of acousmates: sounds of human voices or instruments perceived without a visible source. The term, coined in 1730 in an article describing strange noises heard during the night in a French village, is used to identify mysterious sound phenomena coming from the sky, anticipating by some two centuries the introduction of the concept of the acousmatic by Pierre Schaeffer.
Starting from Bonnet’s article, questions arise that link acousmatic music with the soundscape. Among these is the concept of the ‘acousmatic nature’ of the soundscape: we can in fact extend the term ‘acousmatic’ to all sounds in the landscape whose source we cannot identify, whilst recognising their nature, such as the chirping of a bird we cannot see or the indistinct chirping of crickets or cicadas. In this sense, the soundscape could be defined as acousmatic when the sounds that compose it lack a defined origin, not only when played within a specific listening context, but also in everyday life.
Once we have theorised the ‘acousmatic nature’ of the soundscape, and thus of the natural space in which it unfolds, we may ask ourselves how to transfer it instead into a space designed for acousmatic listening; what spatial trajectories to assign to the sounds – whether to respect their natural ones or to treat the sounds as acousmatic and therefore malleable at our discretion; whether to accept a two-dimensional diffusion, and numerous other reflections aimed at tracing new lines of connection between acousmatic music, studies on the soundscape and the resulting tradition of soundscape composition, bringing together musical practices fundamental to electroacoustic music in the broadest sense.

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