Crowded Spaces is a four-movement electroacoustic exploration of sound association and creative process. The piece was created through a 3-­stage hybrid composition-improvisation cycle that incorporates several concepts presented in Dennis Smalley’s Spectromorphology: explaining sound-shapes (Smalley 1997) and is defined in detail in the attached paper, Exploration Through Process: Crowded Spaces (Martin 2012).
With Crowded Spaces, I wanted to comment on isolation in modern ‘crowded spaces’ and develop a defined creative process that facilitated aspects of indeterminacy, reduced listening, and sonic exploration. I sought to create new experiences by challenging the listeners existing gestural association with particular sounds, defined by Smalley as ‘source bonding’, and by juxtaposing bonded material and unbonded material.
A collection of several real and abstract ‘crowded spaces’ were collected and used as a compositional roadmap for the piece, with each of larger ‘spaces’ being broken down into thee smaller subsections.

Crowded Spaces
1 – Buildings - Floors 0-­8/Floors 13-21/Floors 34-­55
2 – City - Roadway/Green Space/Tea Room
3 – Transport - Mass/Personal/Air
4 – Abstract - Language/Photograph/Queue

Source: 2013