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The Aural Aesthetics of Modernity: From the Philips Pavilion to EMPAC

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 September 2025

Stephanie Loveless  and
Alexis Bhagat
Stephanie Loveless*
Affiliation:
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York, United States Librarian, Albany, New York, United States
Alexis Bhagat
Affiliation:
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York, United States
*
Corresponding author: Stephanie Loveless; Email: lovels3@rpi.edu
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Abstract

In autumn 2023, the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Music and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute presented Shifting Center, an exhibition that explored sound through geological formations, architecture, and cultural artefacts. Using spatialisation techniques such as higher-order ambisonics and wave field synthesis, the works created immersive and disorienting auditory experiences. Curators Vic Brooks and Nida Ghouse framed ‘shifting centre’ as a metaphor for dislocation, evoking feminist and political theories of marginalised peripheries and centralised power. While the exhibition was conceptually and technically ambitious, we argue that the aurality of EMPAC itself – marked by abstraction, isolation and immersion – ultimately muted its decolonial potential. By tracing a lineage of spatial audio from the 1958 Philips Pavilion, we examine how architectural acoustics shape the possibilities of what can be heard in EMPAC, limiting the aural and more-than-aural reception of works presented there.

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Organised Sound , First View , pp. 1 - 7
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© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press

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