The relocation of concrete music in the environment.

Parry contributes to the Lansdown Centre's work in sonic arts (and music), particularly in relation to novel approaches to space and place.
The chapter (2003) develops ideas presented in an invited paper at the 1999 Klagngart Kongress in Osnabrueck, Germany in which the author discussed two of his site-specific sound installations, Living Steam at the Kew Bridge Steam Museum (Sonic Arts Network commission with funds from ACE) and Boomtown (Oldham Borough commission) at the Oldham Art Gallery.
The chapter explores the work in relation to the use of “musicalised” real-world recordings in a site-specific context. Harold Rosenberg's ideas around the “anxious object” in art (Rosenberg 1966) are applied to sonic objects presented in non-traditional musical contexts, specifically those in which their real-world counterparts normally occur. In the Living Steam installation the treated sounds of steam engines are relocated in their source-environment through concealed loudspeakers, so interacting with the actual soundscape of the museum and the working engines.
These ideas form part of a wider discussion of spatial sound composition in which three categories of spatialisation are identified: representational space, metaphorical space and structural space. These ideas have informed the author's subsequent spatial composition in a wide variety of contexts including the performance installation Triptych (Wellcome Trust commission for performance in the Science Museum's Wellcome Wing 2001) and the Stairwell Installation (2005) for the National Maritime Museum's major Nelson and Napoleon exhibition, in which two exhibition spaces were linked through a progressive sound installation in which the visitor's navigation of the space creates a musical and narrative structure. They also occur in a number of works for concert performance such as Fuzzy Logic for Balinese Gamelan, Ambisonic Sound, Strings and Brass, commissioned by the LSO Discovery programme for their Community Gamelan group and members of the orchestra.