Earful.be - A Listening Field

A Listening Field (ALF) is a fabricated aural ecology: a place populated by sounding presences that have their own ways of persisting, changing, becoming active, receding, and affecting one another.

Rather than arranging a sequence of musical events, I compose conditions under which these presences live together. Some remain for long periods. Some appear briefly. Some become more or less active because of what is happening nearby. Their relationships unfold at timescales ranging from the shape of a single sound to changes that may take minutes to become apparent.

A listener enters an ongoing ecology rather than beginning a piece. There need not be a privileged opening, climax or conclusion, and the field does not exist primarily to respond to the listener. The listener can move through it, attend to it, and in some versions may become consequential to it, but the other presences retain lives and relationships of their own.

What is composed?

The sounds themselves are composed, but so are their ways of sounding: how a presence arrives, how long it persists, whether it trembles or breathes, whether it becomes briefly conspicuous, contracts, withdraws, or leaves a trace. I also compose populations and their spatial territories, the temporal conditions through which they move, and sensitivities through which the activity of one presence may alter another.

What I do not compose directly is the particular history that results when all of those conditions coexist. The work can therefore remain recognizable without repeating a fixed sequence. Its form is carried partly by the accumulated history of a living field.

Why an ecology?

The ecological analogy is not meant as a claim that ALF is a simulation of nature. It describes a way of composing relationships. A forest is compelling not just because every sound is individually remarkable, but because many lives with different scales of time, territory and attention coexist. Familiarity can increase without exhausting what is there. ALF seeks something of that quality in fabricated sound.

This changes the compositional question. Instead of asking only what sound should come next, I can ask: What kinds of presences should inhabit this place? How long do their conditions persist? How densely are they distributed? What can they notice about one another? What kinds of encounters leave consequences? How does a beautiful present accumulate into a meaningful past?

Listening

ALF is made because it is something I want to hear. The technical and conceptual questions surrounding it grow out of that compositional desire rather than preceding it. Autonomy, emergence, interactivity, ecology and the other ideas the work encounters are interesting to me because they arise in making and listening to the thing itself.

I think of ALF as music, although establishing that category is not particularly important to me. What matters is what becomes possible to hear over time: individual sounding presences and their relationships; recurrence and change; distance and movement; the evolution of harmonic fields and densities; and larger temporal shapes that can emerge without having been laid out in advance. The hope is to make an aural place worth spending time inside—one that can become increasingly familiar while continuing to retain alterity.

Stereo Captures

These are stereo captures of A Listening Field taken from the iOS version, which uses Unity for spatialization and Chunity ChucK instruments for synthesis. Multichannel versions use Max/MSP for synthesis and Ircam Spat5 for spatialization. The stereo tracks below use different levels of 11/8 transposition of F-major groups and 11/7 transposition of a-minor and d-minor groups. The music is best heard in its mobile app or in multichannel installation (long-play) settings.

The captures below were taken at different points during a several-hour session. Like any community, it takes time for group dynamics and larger patterns of density and harmony to accumulate, and the particular history is different each time. They present the ecology Early, While, and After a While.

Early

While

After a while

An origin in Beethoven’s Molto Adagio

The work takes its initial inspiration from the Molto Adagio of Beethoven’s String Quartet Op. 132 — a movement written during the composer’s recovery from illness. Rather than quoting or reconstructing that music, this piece draws from qualities I have long heard in it: extended stillness, plagal (amen-like) harmony, restraint, and a sense of time that seems to hover rather than move forward. At the center of the field is a gentle harmonic ground, anchored around F. This is not a “key” in the traditional sense, but a place of repose — a sound-world that feels inhabited rather than declared. Around it, related harmonic presences emerge: some broaden the field outward, some briefly brighten it, some thin and withdraw. These changes are subtle and slow, often taking minutes or hours to become perceptible. Occasionally, contrasting colors appear—minor inflections that depart from the prevailing harmonic ground, or luminous Lydian colors marked by a raised fourth. These moments are never sustained for long. Like light breaking through clouds, they appear briefly and recede, leaving the field fundamentally unchanged but gently altered by memory. Silence is not an absence here but an active state. Much of the ecology exists just below audibility, resting, waiting, or breathing. The music’s density rises and falls naturally, producing long spans of near-stillness punctuated by quiet articulations.

Harmonic Language and Tuning

The work is grounded in Just Intonation, chosen not for historical reenactment but for its capacity to sustain sound without functional-harmonic pressure. Ratios such as 11/8, 5/3, 17/12, and carefully inflected versions of each are used to introduce color and motion without reintroducing functional tonality. Higher N-limit ratios—such as 23/16, 29/16, and 13/8—are also used to create different colors of harmonic light or to convey local turbulence in the harmonic fields. The work avoids allowing major or minor thirds to establish conventional triadic identity. When thirds appear, they can contribute warmth and color without necessarily defining functional major or minor harmony.

Since the Molto Adagio is in F Lydian - with a B-natural rather than B-flat - the relationship of F and C is more of breathing than their usual tonic-dominant functionality. They function less as an engine of harmonic tension than as a polarity of respiration and harmonic adjacency. They are represented here with Just triads (1/1, 5/4, 3/2, 9/4) and occasional 17/12 for a glint of color. They form the foundation of A Listening Field. The Lydian raised 4th is represented here with 11/8, which gives it a more acoustically integrated harmony than the more harmonically abrasive 12-TET tritone. The 11/8 is used as a chord tone but also as an axis of transposition where groups of F and C harmonies shift their fundamental frequencies by exponents of 11/8. This allows Lydian ‘11-ness’ to permeate the field more broadly. Another axis of transposition comes from the Molto Adagio's use of D minor and A minor chords. The Molto Adagio’s excursions toward D minor and A minor have always affected me strongly, although I am increasingly reluctant to assign a particular emotional meaning to them. Their contrast with the sustained F-Lydian world—harmonically, gesturally, and in their sense of motion—has been one of the things I continue to listen to most closely in the movement. In A Listening Field, their harmonies can be transposed up and down by exponents of other ratios - so far, 11/7 and 6/5. Each of these tonal families of F, C, F Lydian, A minor, and D minor includes variants with octave displacement or higher N-limit ratios in order to expand their color.

These sonic entities animate spatially, in flocks. Each flock’s “species” carries a harmonic and spectral identity, expressed sometimes boldly and sometimes with nuance through its various States. State changes can alter registral spread, harmonic color, temporal activity, and expressive characteristics such as vibrato, tremolo, and gain shaping. The species are related ecologically as well: the activity of one group can influence the States occupied by another, including movement into or out of silence. These relationships allow changes in density, harmony, and population to accumulate over time. Although Beethoven’s Op. 132 Molto Adagio—a lifelong favorite—was an initial inspiration and model, the relationships and sonorities developed for A Listening Field have increasingly taken on a life of their own.

Improvisation and Performance

Because the field is event-oriented, its internal interactions also provide points of contact with influences from outside the ecology. Live improvising performers can enter into these relationships through companion mobile apps that interpret aspects of musical, gestural, or visual expression and translate salient features into events the ecology can encounter. These external events participate in the same behavioral mechanisms as events generated within the field.

For musical interaction, each performer uses a custom app that listens to their audio input and analyzes features such as pitch stability, spectral character, intensity, and vibrato. Pitch history is compared with the tonal profiles of ALF’s States, while unpitched expressions can introduce “turbulence” into the ecology. These features do not directly trigger musical events; instead, they influence the evolving conditions of the system. Performers function as catalysts rather than controllers: their actions are subject to the ecology’s behaviors and probabilities. They invite change, while the field retains its own momentum and characteristic behavior.

Visual Art

Visual art has been part of the development of Earful for some time, particularly through my collaborations with painter Teresa Parod. In Crossroads AR, a group of paintings was exhibited together, each associated with its own behavioral musical ensembles. Recognizing a painting with a mobile device introduced its ensembles into a shared, evolving ecology, where they interacted with ensembles already brought into the space by other paintings. The viewer could therefore change the population and expressive scope of the ecology simply through the act of looking. More recent work, including The Elephants of Trianon, has explored relationships among visual scenes, animation, spatial sound, and behavioral characters in somewhat different ways.

With Teresa’s new series of paintings related to the planet Venus, I am interested in working at a finer grain. In Crossroads, paintings contributed whole populations to the ecology. With Venus, I want characteristics within the paintings—color, luminance, contrast, hue, saturation, and potentially other visual relationships—to exert more particular influences within A Listening Field. These need not trigger sounds directly. Like encounters among ALF’s sounding presences, something perceived in a painting might instead alter the conditions under which subsequent musical activity unfolds.

This is one reason ALF’s sounds have been developed from relatively elemental materials. Individual oscillators, spectra, envelopes, registers, vibrato, tremolo, and pitch trajectories allow sounding identities to be constructed at a finer level than the improvised violin phrases used in Crossroads. The profiles and States formed from these materials offer correspondingly finer points at which qualities of a painting might become consequential to the ecology.

A Listening Field is being developed for both multichannel installation and mobile listening in conjunction with the planned Venus exhibition. The banner and sound-example images on this page come from an early sketch for one of Teresa Parod’s Venus paintings.

How ALF works

A Listening Field is made with Earful, a software architecture and compositional practice I have developed around a simple question: rather than determining a succession of musical events, can I compose the characters, circumstances, tendencies, and relationships from which a musical history develops?

An Earful work is populated by individual entities. Each belongs to an Actor, which gives it a persistent identity and repertoire, while its changing State determines how that identity is expressed at a particular time. A State governs such things as how active or silent an entity is, how frequently it sounds, how long its current condition persists, and where it may go next. Sounds provide the particular expressions available to an Actor in a State.

Entities ordinarily inhabit the work in Flocks, which establish population and spatial circumstances: how many entities are present, where they live, how widely they disperse, and how they move. Several Flocks can contain the same kind of Actor while occupying quite different regions and moving differently through the field. State and Flock therefore contribute different dimensions to musical density: one shapes an entity’s activity through time, while the other shapes the number and spatial distribution of entities living that activity.

Behavior and consequence

Sounds in Earful are not only things to be heard. They are events within the ecology and can become consequential to other entities.

Behaviors describe possible relationships among Actors in particular States. A qualifying event contributes influence toward a listening entity. That influence is weighted by spatial proximity and fades through time. A single occurrence may have little consequence and disappear; repeated or persistent activity arriving with greater temporal proximity can accumulate. If that influence crosses a threshold, the listening entity may move into another State.

This provides a simple way for something resembling insistence to become consequential without defining “insistence” as a musical instruction. It can arise from the repeated activity of one entity or collectively from the activity of a population. The listening entity’s State matters as well: different States can retain or shed accumulated influence at different rates. The same activity can therefore be consequential to an entity in one condition and scarcely affect it in another.

A State consequently describes not only how an entity sounds and lives through time, but also something about how it can be affected by the temporal behavior of others. State physiology and Flock organization jointly create behavioral pressure, while the listening State helps determine susceptibility to that pressure.

From behavior to musical form

These interactions are local, but their consequences can become larger-scale and musical. A Behavior may move entities into a quieter or more active State, into or out of silence, or toward States with different registers, harmonic materials, durations, and sounding characteristics. This changes the density and harmonic condition of the field, which in turn changes the events available to affect other entities.

Form in ALF therefore arises at several scales. State durations and transitions establish temporal tendencies; unequal cycles of activity and silence shape longer spans; Flock populations and spatial distributions affect density and encounter; and Behaviors can redirect populations among States. Harmonic fields and densities can consequently evolve over time, sometimes producing larger shapes and even moments of convergence or release without those particular sequences having been laid out in advance.

This does not mean that Earful requires an open or highly stochastic form. The same architecture can use tighter temporal ranges and more constrained State transitions to produce considerably more predetermined structures. ALF occupies one region within that broader compositional range.

ALF’s sounding presences

In A Listening Field, Earful operates at a particularly fine sonic grain. The identity of a sounding presence is built from relatively elemental materials—oscillators, spectra, envelopes, register, vibrato, tremolo, pitch trajectories, durations, and silence. Related profiles allow an Actor to retain an audible identity while inhabiting quite different States.

This is one distinction between ALF and some earlier Earful works. The first Ecologies used animal recordings, whose calls already arrived with richly formed sonic identities. Crossroads AR used hundreds of improvised five-string violin phrases organized into musical characters and ensembles. ALF moves farther inside the sound itself, composing aspects of the sounding physiology as well as the circumstances in which it lives.

That finer grain is also important to the developing work with Teresa Parod’s Venus paintings. Rather than requiring a perceived visual feature to trigger a particular sound, characteristics of a painting may become consequential to conditions within the ecology—affecting possibilities from which subsequent musical activity unfolds.

Implementation

Earful runs the behavioral and spatial ecology in Unity, where entities, Flocks, States, and their interactions exist in real time in three-dimensional space. On mobile devices, ALF can synthesize and spatialize its sounds locally. For multichannel installations, Unity can instead communicate the events and positions of the ecology over OSC to Max/MSP and IRCAM Spat, where the sounding entities are synthesized and spatialized for the particular loudspeaker environment.

The compositional definitions themselves are deliberately compact. Three principal tables describe States, the Sounds available within them, and Behaviors through which entities can influence one another. A relatively small set of definitions can therefore produce many different histories as populations move, sound, change condition, and encounter one another.

ALF currently contains approximately 110 entities distributed among 11 Flocks and 19 States, with roughly 100 pitch definitions and a comparatively small number of Behavior relationships. The complexity heard in the resulting ecology comes less from a large number of explicit rules than from the repeated interaction of these simple conditions over time.

A fuller account of Earful as a compositional practice and its development across ALF and other works is forthcoming.