Michael Fowler: "Teimu (the garden of dreams): Aural and aesthetic attributes of Japanese gardens as models for spatial environments."

Michael Fowler is an ARC Post Doctoral Fellow at the Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory, Sound Studios, RMIT University

ABSTRACT:

Traditional Japanese garden design has greatly influenced both twentieth-century Western landscape designers and composers of Western art music. By investigating the aural and aesthetic attributes of five renowned Japanese gardens through mapping techniques that include the capture of spatial auditory recordings, RMIT and University of Melbourne researchers have worked over the past two years on strategies for the representation, 3-space modelling and auralisation of large environmental invariant data-sets. Dr. Michael Fowler will present research to date on the project, and explore the potential of the work to inform future design processes in architecture, spatial sound installation and urban sound design.

 

 

ABOUT MICHAEL FOWLER:

Michael Fowler is a keyboardist who studied piano in Australia under Colin Spiers (University of Newcastle), and the late Dr. William Black (College-Conservatory of Music, University of Cincinnati), as well as synthesizer with Antonio Peréz Abellán (Stockhausen-Stiftung). Fowler is an exponent of electro-acoustic music, and performs on a variety of keyboard instruments including, synthesizers, the toy piano, live electronics, circuit-bending devices and the prepared piano. He has worked and performed with some of the most recognized composers of the 20th and 21st Century including Karlheinz Stockhausen, George Crumb, Steve Reich and Milton Babbitt. The New York Times (2007) has described him as a performer ‘of consummate virtuosity’, while the Atlanta-Constitution Journal (2002) has lauded his ‘inimitable panache’. Fowler is currently an ARC (Australian Research Council) Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory (SIAL) at RMIT University. His association with SIAL centers on research into electro-acoustic performance practices, studies into the analysis of graphic and open-ended notational systems using NURBS modelling, and through a recently awarded ARC Discovery grant, Japanese garden design as a model for spatial environments, multi-channel soundscape design and new compositional processes in architecture and music.