Enhancing engagement in multimodality environments by sound movement in a virtual space.

Since 1959, when electronic music was established as a new way of music composition, the rules of traditional music performance and enjoyment have changed to include space, motion, and gesture as musical parameters. For example, musicians are often located somewhere other than the stage - sometimes even in the audience - and where the music will be performed often influences compositional thinking. Loudspeakers move sound through the space at varying speeds (based on other musical parameters). In addition, the development of live electronics - that is, computers applied to real-time processing of instrumental sounds - has allowed space as a musical instrumental practice to flourish. Electro-acoustic technologies let composers explore new listening dimensions and consider the sounds coming from loudspeakers as possessing different logical meanings from the sounds produced by traditional instruments. Medea, Adriano Guarnieri's "video opera", is an innovative work stemming from research in multimedia that demonstrates the importance and amount of research dedicated to sound movement in space. Medea is part of the Multi-sensory Expressive Gesture Application project (http://www.megaproject.org). Among Medea's intentions, is a desire to establish an explicit connection between sound movement and expressiveness and to show how engagement can be enhanced acoustically in multimodality environments - for example, through the motion of sound through virtual spaces. Whereas sound positioning and movement have seldom been used in concert settings, the ear has great detection capabilities connected to its primary role (a signaling device for invisible or unseen cues); music is now trying to put these capabilities to creative use.