New Forms of Music: Sound is a Spatial Force
Anonymous portrait of Vivaldi, c.1723.
Robin Sparkes September 18, 2025
If we listen to Antonio Lucio Vivaldi today, we may think of him as a classicist. In his time, however, he was at the very edge of the avant-garde; an innovator who unsettled musical tradition by setting harmony into motion. In the early 18th century, while many composers relied on static repetitions of familiar chords, Vivaldi began shaping progressions into sequences that pulled irresistibly forward, shifting the listener’s perception of space. He pioneered the now iconic chord progression, which became the foundation of almost every pop song today. He arranged harmonies as steps ascending a staircase, each leading into the next, a system Howard Goodall has described as a kind of musical gravity. Harmony was no longer a backdrop but an engine, driving both the music and the listener into acceleration.
To imagine this, think of a simple triad played on a keyboard C, E, and G. In isolation, the notes hang still in the air. When Vivaldi set chords into sequence, each one tilted toward a harmonic resolution, leading at the ear and propelling the listener through unfolding time. This momentum is felt in the body: a tightening, a quickening, a sensation of being carried forward. Audiences of his day described it as electrifying, an experience beyond sound, a psychoacoustic movement through time and space.
Vivaldi’s interventions transformed music into something spatial, even architectural. Listeners were no longer hearing notes in sequence, but inhabiting a sonic environment that expanded and contracted around them. His work opened a realm of possibility, allowing music to reconfigure the perception of time and space itself. This experience of acceleration, of being swept into motion by sound, foreshadows the ways new forms of music act as spatial interventions, reshaping how we move, and inhabit the world.
Wendy Carlos
Electronic Music
In the late 1950s, the German engineer Harald Bode developed the first modular musical system, and by the 1960s, commercially available modular synthesizers began to emerge, offering composers and performers expanded control over sound synthesis. Wendy Carlos’s Switched-On Bach (1968) exemplifies this approach, utilizing the Moog synthesizer to perform Johann Sebastian Bach's compositions. Unlike traditional acoustic instruments, the synth allowed Carlos to manipulate pitch, timbre, dynamics, and articulation with precise control. She translated each note and articulation into electronic signals, which were then processed through the synth’s oscillators, filters, and modulators, enabling a wide range of tonal colors and dynamic contrasts.
Because the Moog was monophonic, Carlos recorded each part separately and layered them to reconstruct the full texture of Bach’s works, a meticulous process that showed the capabilities of the synthesizer as a serious instrument for classical music interpretation. By reimagining Bach electronically, Carlos expanded the expressive possibilities of the compositions and demonstrated how sound could be sculpted and structured in ways impossible with acoustic instruments. Her work made listeners aware of the spatial and temporal dimensions of music, where the precise control of frequencies and modulation could shape perception, demonstrating a new form of musical experience.
Switched-On Bach is reverent, yet radically synthetic. Carlos’s synth echoes offer a new possibility of what music can be in an age shaped by dense industrial sound and electronic amplification. The work reclaims experiences that subvert hierarchy and introduce new dimensions of listening and making. In doing so, her electronic sound dissolves classicist boundaries between performer, instrument, and space, opening room for agency within and beyond inherited musical forms and sonic spatial practices.
“Studios functioned as infrastructures of autonomy, transmitting sonic agency to shape how we think, feel, and inhabit place and space.”
Sonic Memory
Within the broader idea that sound is spatial, sonic memory shows how music and noise are inscribed not only in recordings and compositions but in the very spaces where the music is made. It reveals how traditions and experiments endure across time, through tapes, instruments, studios, and architectures that carry the imprint of cultural histories. Paul Purgas unearthed one such archive, recordings made between 1969 and 1972 at South Asia’s first electronic music studio, housed at the National Institute of Design (NID) in Ahmedabad, India. Long neglected, these tapes document how local composers used oscillators, filters, and patch bays to experiment with electronic sound on their own terms. They blended raga, tala, and modernist technique into new sonic languages, transforming the studio into a site of cultural authorship. Through Purgas’ archival project We Found Our Own Reality, he reframes the NID studio as a living infrastructure of memory where electronic sound became a means of reclaiming identity and rethinking the history of music itself.
At NID, Purgas highlights the work of composers Jinraj Joshipura, Gita Sarabhai, and S.C. Sharma, noting compositions such as Space Liner 2001, Frequencies in Square, and Sine Wave of Chromatic Scale. These pieces wove Indian rhythmic and modal traditions into the experimental grammar of modular synthesis, turning the studio into a hybrid space where raga and tala interfaced with signal flow to generate new forms of expression. Joshipura’s Space Liner 2001, composed at age 19, charts an interstellar journey through layered drones and synthetic pulses. He approached the synthesizer architecturally, sketching color coded patches to map the logic of his signal paths. Drawing from science fiction and spatial design, his work sought to “stand outside history,” building auditory structures that imagined futures beyond inherited systems.
Through the archive, Purgas has reactivated these experimental spaces, positioning the NID studio within the post-independence ambition and design-led pedagogy of its time. As he writes, “the infrastructure of electronic sound in India was neither a clone nor an imitation, but an extension of local pedagogies and cosmologies into new technological territories.” The work challenges colonial narratives that marginalized South Asian approaches to sound and space. By revealing the voices of early South Asian electronic composers and highlighting the spatial dimension of their practice, Purgas shows how these studios functioned as infrastructures of autonomy, transmitting sonic agency to shape how we think, feel, and inhabit place and space.
In his own practice, Purgas treats architecture as an instrument by activating abandoned buildings to explore their acoustic character. In one project at Woodchester Mansion, an unfinished Gothic Revival house in the British Cotswolds, he set up speakers and microphones to amplify sub-bass rumble through walls and staircases, capturing the building’s natural resonances. He recorded creaks, echoes, and structural vibrations without editing, letting the house perform itself through sound. This approach mirrors, in more explicit detail, how underground punk bands in abandoned squats and warehouses reclaimed derelict spaces, using raw acoustics and collective energy to resist institutional norms. By recording with minimal interference, Purgas exposed the spatial memory embedded in the structure’s fabric. The resulting audio traces reveal architecture as a living partner in sound design, demonstrating how sonic agency is rooted in place, history, and material presence.
Cõvco performer Surrender
Sonic Agency in Motion
Stephelle, founder of Area Scatter, a platform dedicated to experimental sound and spatial programming recently curated a performance at OR space in London titled SURRENDER by Cõvco, demonstrating how contemporary approaches to sound actively reorganize space. Performing from within a mobile structure Cõvco designed herself, she navigated through the audience erratically, prompting the crowd to shift, follow, and respond to her motion. The sound moved with her, transforming the room into an instrument. As Cõvco describes it, the work is about “surrendering to low-frequency subwoofers,” and her mobile structure, inspired by soundsystem culture, resembled a large, black speaker frame on wheels. In her words, agency emerges as “demand and permission, invasive invitation for homecoming and stranger’s paradise.” Sonic agency in the performance operates through movement and attention, shifting how space is perceived and inviting the audience to listen with the body.
Thinking through new forms of music reveals how sound can rebuild the built environment from the inside out. It defines the space around us, physically, emotionally, and architecturally, moves as vibration, shaping and being shaped by every surface it touches: low frequencies wrap and press, high ones scatter and slice. Space is redrawn by sound moving through it.
From the smallest scale of a headphone chamber, which alters perception and navigation, to the macro of an entire cityscape, sonic energy maps volume, depth, and edge in real time. What we hear is a reading of space; what we feel is its design. Sound fills, transforms, and expands. From the key of the sonics to the beat per minute, vibration becomes a tool for exploring spatial design. From micro to macro, sound waves form invisible structures in a continuous act of spatial design.
In an age when access to space is increasingly monitored, privatized, and algorithmically managed, music offers blueprints for reimagining how we inhabit the world. To embody sonic and spatial agency is to reshape space from within.
Robin Sparkes, is a spatial designer, studying the kinesthetic experience of architecture. Her design, research, and writing practice traverses the relationship between the body, temporality, and the acoustics of space.
