Taxonomy of Sonic Space in an Acousmatic Listening Situation

Abstract Space has an essential function in our auditory perception, and it has played an important role in music since the earliest stages of the art form. The experience of space is fundamental to many aspects of human sensory perception, which makes it a complex and deeply multimodal phenomenon. This is probably why many scholars employ the word “space” to describe drastically different concepts, such as a geographical location (e.g., a university campus), a geometric notion (e.g., the area of a circle), the organization of audio frequencies (pitch space), or even the abstract crossroads of heterogeneous and yet cohesive human behaviors (cultural space). We often lack the proper vocabulary to precisely describe the complexity of spatial phenomena, and therefore tend to amalgamate geometric, perceptive, and metaphoric notions under the same umbrella. The aim of this paper is to propose an appropriate taxonomy of the various dimensions that constitute our experience of space in listening, from its conception to its perception. In addition to summarizing and clarifying existing taxonomies by Jean-Marc Duchenne, Michel Chion, and Denis Smalley, and we propose new concepts such as the proper source order, the operational space, the resolution, and the spatial saturation. Although this paper is not limited to electroacoustic music, we will draw most of our experiences and concepts from the literature surrounding this genre, as space is one of its fundamental parameters.