EMS Proceedings and Other Publications

Discovering How Accessible Electroacoustic Music Can Be: The Intention/Reception Project

Leigh Landy & Rob Weale

The Intention/Reception project has two key objectives: comparing a composer’s intention with listeners’ reception and, more importantly, investigating to what extent certain electroacoustic works - in our case, works including identifiable real-world sounds - are deemed to be accessible leading to increased appreciation of this corpus of music. Our approach involves user groups of widely varying levels of experience. Our basic assumption is that a great deal of electroacoustic music is fairly marginalised in today’s society, something we find to be an unnecessary state of affairs.

This paper introduces the Intention/Reception project outlining its background, its context and presenting pertinent points concerning its methodology. Furthermore, some of the exciting key results discovered thus far, including the first presentation of test data that formed the basis of the conclusions of a recently completed doctoral thesis, will be shared.