The environment in which sound is situated mediates our perception of it. What if we changed the perspective from which we listened to the flute? What sort of musical possibilities could we uncover? Our project seeks to capture the inner world of the flute, differentiating it from the world that the flute inhabits. Displacing our listening perspective allows us to inhabit sonic landscapes we can only imagine.

Flutists, like other instrumentalists, use feedback systems to guide their technique. Disrupting the pathways used to guide performance challenges the relationship between performer and instrument. PrismaSonus uses microphone placement to intentionally alter the action-sound mapping of flute techniques, demonstrating how these new instrumental affordances offer new musical possibilities.

Our project manipulates the sound of the flute by shifting the listening perspective, rather than altering the sound source itself. By situating listening within the flute itself, we explore how the body of the instrument has its own acoustics. We use technology to invite the audience into the nuanced, intimate inner world of the flute, challenging the traditional spatial relationship between performer, instrument, and audience.

The environment in which sound is situated affects our perception of it. We explore how the sonic landscape inside of the flute is transformed by playing techniques. By capturing sounds from multiple locations, we demonstrate how the flute is perceived from different perspectives. Our project illuminates new sonic realms of the flute which are otherwise hidden from audiences, and in some cases the performers themselves.

Our project documents how technology mediates interactions between collaborators. We seek to understand how performers and composers navigate differences in experience and expectation. We offer our working method as an example of a partnership in which the performer and composer feel co-ownership over musical output as they explore the altered instrumental space together.

We combine three approaches to our discussion: acoustical analysis, music notation, and a performer-oriented exploration of the physicality of playing. In addition to creating a guide for how flute techniques transfer into the electroacoustic realm, this project sparks a broader discussion about the relationship between technology, technique, and notation, and how technology mediates communication between performers and composers.

PrismaSonus expands the vocabulary of the 21st-century flutist by providing a detailed toolkit of electronically-mediated playing techniques. The eventual goal of PrismaSonus is to create an interactive toolkit that performers, performer-composers, composers, and researchers can use as a framework for their own instrumental explorations.