Speaker Park: An intersection of Loudspeaker Design and Post-Acousmatic Composition

This chapter explores the technical and creative opportunities and challenges of Speaker Park by Saario and Pigott, through themes of creative collaboration, the physicality of sound, space and materials and the idea of the assemblage. Speaker Park was a project which brought together a custom, 24-channel installation of hand built, sculptural loudspeakers made by Roar Slette-land and Jon Pigott, with two composers, Antti Sakari Saario and Mari Kvien Brunvoll, who took up residencies to work with the system. For Saario, the territory of the creative foregrounding of loudspeakers within Speaker Park maps to a post-acousmatic sensibility. As such Speaker Park as a compositional medium, context and value proposition, affords the post-acousmatic composer an excellent platform and a creative matrix to explore sound-based fixed-media composition, body work, and affective space production.