The Meta-Instrument

Abstract

To understand the Meta-Instrument, it is important to understand its history. I am both a musician and an engineer, having studied music at the Conservatoire National Superieure de Musique and sound engineering at the Ecole Nationale Louis Lumiere. From 1983-1988, our group worked on simulating the movement of sound in three dimensions. This led to the creation of the Octophonic Spatial Processor, a system of 16 voltage-controlled amplifiers (VCAs) controlled by a dedicated processor. The different kinds of music composed on this system led to an immediate observation: it is more interesting to move a sound around in space if this movement is connected to its spectral evolution. The nature of this connection may be one of three types: (1) realistic-center/exterior Doppler effect, with the direct signal below and the reverberation signal above; (2) speculative-the sharper the notes, the more they seem to be on the right; the longer they are, the more they are positioned behind the listeners; and (3) dramatic-the sound of steps comes in from the right rear and goes around us, running away toward the left rear, and so on. The musical pathways opened up by this kind of research were quite stimulating, but they confronted a problem of interface. Although space is metaphorically omnipresent in music, traditional instruments have not been designed to shift sounds around in space. The second reason for creating the MetaInstrument was linked to the demand of the musicians at the Espace Musical to be able to play concr'te music, as invented by Pierre Schaeffer, not only in recorded form, but also in live concert performance. The goal was to try to associate the change brought about by magnetic recordings, which allow the musician to work with all