This paper introduces strategies for the electroacoustic community to relate to, and engage with, the visual music phenomenon. It addresses technological, historical, cultural and idiomatic intersections between the two art forms. From the personal viewpoint of a trained synaesthete of acousmatic origin, the boundaries between sonic and audiovisual compositional practices appear somewhat porous. The electroacoustic language is intrinsically visual, even within its acousmatic paradigm. Visible morphologies acquire a sonorous dimension as soon as we uproot them from their cinematographic habitat and plunge them into the cauldron of a new alchemy. Multi-disciplinary lines of enquiry are essential to elucidate the workings of complex multimediatic interactions such as those at play in visual music. Yet, a holistic view of the creative and technological pathways is equally significant so that artistic truths, and myths, can be (re)discovered amidst lines of code or loops of wire connecting our computer peripherals. Thus this article is written both with the language of an analyst and, perhaps more, with the expressions and idiosyncrasies of an academic composer. A few selected examples from the contemporary repertoire are discussed to exemplify a variety of approaches to visual music composition, including extracts from the work Patah (Garro 2010).

Gender is a category that is mostly unexplored in the field of new music interface technology. This paper explores some aspects of gender within the field. First, it studies the academic literature of the last five years with regard to the gender of the participants and the gender awareness of its content. Men are found to outnumber women in the field. The inspection of the literature shows a marked absence of documented gender awareness in the field. Then, the paper explores gender in new music interface technology performances of the last five years: two by male and two by female performers. It is discussed how they individually and in their cross-relationship speak to gender constructions. The analysis suggests that female performances seem to speak to gender issues whereas male performances seem to show an absence of gender as category. Finally, a further device is contrasted with these performances. I suggest that this technology is of particular interest for the artistic exploration of gender by making the body the recipient of performance.

This conference talk is about change. It does not pretend to be an academic paper as such; it was offered at the ‘Music without Walls? Music without Instruments?’ conference as a provocative ‘performance’. The following pages investigate twenty-six developments associated with music that one might discover in the not-too-distant future.

Hildegard Westerkamp's Kits Beach Soundwalk challenges us as listeners to re-evaluate our acoustic soundscape. Juxtaposing the sounds of barnacles with the noise of the city, Westerkamp reveals an unbalanced world in which individual voices are silenced. Kits Beach Soundwalk allows Westerkamp to help rectify that imbalance. It provides her with the opportunity to create a place in which a listener can take pleasure in simply being. She reveals the metaphors, the hidden entrances, within sounds that take us into other spaces. A listener travels with Westerkamp into worlds of tiny sounds and tiny voices, dreams, and places of fantasy and the imagination. She challenges us as listeners to re-establish our place within the world around us. By designing the piece to reach the audience on a number of levels - intellectual, physiological, metaphorical - Westerkamp effectively promotes the changing of listening habits; the distancing of individuals from oppressive sonic environments; and the regaining of an individual's inner voice.

The soundscape composition is the journey that circumscribes the relationship, the conversation between composer and sound sources. (Hildegard Westerkamp)

Environmental sounds hold an unusual place in our imaginations. On the one hand, hey make up the often unnoticed ambiences of our daily lives: they are so much with us and surrounding us that it takes a special effort to bring them into the foreground, and pay attention to them. On the other hand, environmental sounds form a powerful conduit to memory. Hearing a particular sound or ambience can launch a chain of related memories, whether experienced consciously or working subconsciously, that reconnects us with particular places and times in our lives. It is precisely these confluences of memory, time and place that interest those who compose with soundscapes.

This article sketches a theoretical framework that allows the conceptual inclusion of non-human animals and artificial intelligences in human sonic collaborations. Post-humanist concepts that question the categorical divide between nature and culture, following Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour, converge with contemporary, non-adaptationist evolutionary aesthetics. Therefore, the anthropocentric ‘othering’ of non-humans gives way to a concept of a more-than-human sociality of sound. We offer some theoretical propositions for the extension of socially engaged sound practices to collaborations between humans and non-human animals and between humans and artificial intelligences, and then exemplify such multispecies sonic collaborations by analysing some existing projects from the fields of sound art and musical performance. After drawing some more general conclusions from these analyses, we hint at potential aesthetical and ethical parallels between animal and AI creative agency. Finally, we point out a few questions we see as important for future advanced settings of such collaborations, especially when it comes to assemblages of different AI technologies and to future concepts of animal–computer interaction that might enable non-human animals and artificial intelligence to cooperate creatively.

The origins of women's pioneering contributions to the repertoire and history of electroacoustic music can often be linked to the growth of academic and commercial electronic and computer music studios in North America. A signific ant number of early female composers in the medium received their initial training and experience in the United States and their accomplishments begin in the earliest decades of the twentieth century. Women's achievements in the educational and entertainment sectors have laid the foundation for subsequent generations who have influenced the aesthetic and technical path of electroacoustic music.

Excerpted from several chapters of the author's historical series on women composers and music technology, the article outlines the contributions of several of the earliest women in the United States to the utilisation of music technology in creative work. Also discussed are research precedents in this area and issues regarding women and music technology in the United States today. With the creation of her book series outlining the achievements of women working with music technology, the author hopes to offer a valuable contribution to research on the history of electroacoustic music in general and women's representation in the genre in particular.

This paper presents a process-based approach to considering workshops as a route to participation in collective creative musical practice. We evoke the notion of the Music One Participates In, which focuses on a shift from the listener-as-consumer to participant-actor actively engaged in sound perception and production. We look at the range of different methods that make up the term ‘workshop’, as well as emergent relationships between facilitator and participant in creative do-it-yourself activities to frame our discussion of participatory music practice. We then examine the nature of participation across a range of disciplines from social and cognitive science through human computer interaction to radical and contemporary art, and identify possible contradictions in horizontal utopian organisational models. With this conceptual frame as a backdrop, we present four types of workshop that we have conducted across time at different sites with diverse groups of participants. We apply concepts from the participation literature to analyse our music workshops, and attempt to reconcile the potentially diverging agendas of facilitator and participant to arrive at a process-based view of ‘workshopping’.

This article provides a brief survey of composition in which field recordings or other referential sounds are transcribed for acoustic instruments. Through a discussion of how electroacoustic music and scholarship have conceptualised the notion of mimesis, and how various forms of contemporary acoustic music have adopted electroacoustic techniques, it identifies a recent musical practice in which these concerns are brought together. The article proposes the term mimetic instrumental resynthesis as a way of describing the common threads behind works that employ electronic-assisted or computer-assisted techniques towards instrumental imitations of environmental and extra-musical sounds. The article also highlights some of the conceptual and aesthetic questions emerging from such a practice, including the idea of transformation, issues of referentiality, listening, the influence of different technologies and their aesthetic implications, and the tension between abstract and concrete conceptions of the works discussed. Finally, the article raises concerns surrounding the language of discussing what is necessarily an interdisciplinary venture.

This article investigates the essential association between location and sound, mediated and represented by the process of recording and the subsequent creation of an artwork. The basic argument this article would like to develop is that location-specific sound recording, as practised by artists and phonographers, is basically an exercise in disembodiment of sound from environment, whether it is observational or immersive in approach; if the purpose of this mediation by recording is artistically reconstructive, the location-specificity of the recorded sound is displaced by the further mediation of the creative process. By developing the argument from an experimental angle, in relation to an audio art project Landscape in Metamorphoses, this article will try to examine how the discourse of acoustic ecology becomes reconfigured in the shift from environmental sound content recorded at location to production of soundscape composition as audio artwork. Today, the application of digital media to artistic practice has become integral – in the case of audio art via creation of auditory art works (for both spatial diffusion and live interaction); this can bring about a reconfiguration of environmental aesthetics. The article will find relevance in redesigning the ecological discourse in the digital realm of ‘soundscaping’ through the practice of mediation, as composing of the sound of location, or ‘place’.

Discussing listeners and their listening process in electroacoustic music has always been a difficult task because of the apparent subjectivity of listening. If we understand, however, that listening is a phenomenal process, the subjectivity of listening should be considered an important and crucial factor that can be discussed and explained by phenomenological approaches. This paper first conducts a brief survey of some electroacoustic music and observes primary sound-images – body, place and their negations – that emerge from the phenomenological approaches. The observation of the emergence of these primary sound-images then leads us to consider two listening processes, perceiving and imagining, that act as the main correlates of the listening process in which listeners engage with electroacoustic music. This paper also discusses the phenomena of sound-images, the product of the two listening processes, and explains what we as listeners imagine and how we imagine when we listen to electroacoustic music. Finally, the paper examines the properties of body and place as sound-images and how these sound-images are negated in imaginal listening of electroacoustic music.

This article makes an argument for the postcritical treatment of the politics of sound art. Counterpointing an autoethnographic analysis of Kristina Kubisch’s Electrical Walks with Seth Kim-Cohen’s critical reading of the same work, I show how a critical position detached from the lived experience leaves behind a wealth of meanings necessary to understand the political potential of sound art. This gap, I argue, necessitates a ‘radical empiricist’ approach shifting the focus from the artistic intent to the lived experiences of the audience and the effects sound art may have on their lives. Drawing on autoethnographic and ethnographic accounts of Kaffe Matthews’s sonic bike rides and Benoît Maubrey Speaker Sculptures, as well as Rita Felski’s project of postcritical reading, I develop a theoretical framework for the politics of sound art based around the concept of affordance. The term ‘affordance’ in this context refers to the possibilities of political meaning or political action an artwork offers to the participants without imposing a particular interpretation on them. I finish by discussing three aspects of political affordances in sound art: meaning-making, uses of sound art and access to participation.

Musique concrète has become a well-known word and concept. The history of the concept permits us to understand how it evolved and how its inventor, Pierre Schaeffer, felt about it and its impact. The terms have gone through several transformations, the main one being that into the term acousmatique, which implied a change of perspective in the reach of the concept. Today musique concrète is an active concept, not generally applied to describe contemporary musical creation, however embedded in musical thought and theory.

At a time when our sense of physical space is being radically challenged and modified by new global communication technologies, it seems not unusual that composers are taking a renewed interest in it. We have begun to experiment with using the new technologies available to us to move sound in space and create surround-sound environments.

For electroacoustic music and other soundscapes we have pan pots on our mixing desks and in our synthesizers to radially position sounds between loudspeakers, and reverberators to simulate the distance of sound sources from the listener. Dolby Digital 5.1 (AC-3) and DTS were introduced as competing standards for theatre sound recordings around 1992 and consumer products are available in both formats. In addition, Digital Versatile Discs (DVDs) are making sophisticated soundfield techniques such as Ambisonics both practical and more accessible.

This article traces some of my own explorations in the use of 3-space for musical composition, examines the limitations of basing structuring methodologies primarily on functional psychoacoustic studies of hearing, and suggests alternative approaches based on an understanding of 3-space from the work of the perceptual psychologist James Gibson.

This article discusses the compositional strategies of turntablist DJs working within the hip-hop genre, focusing on processes developed by these musicians such as mixing, scratching and beat juggling, all of which are carried out on turntables. Since the development of the gramophone at the turn of the century, the turntable has become an instrument of creation as well as reproduction, resulting in the ground-breaking compositional strategies of hip-hop music. Hip-hop DJs create original music from a range of existing musical texts and in doing so, raise questions concerning originality and authorship as well as questioning the division between composer and performer. Hip-hop music is regarded by authors such as Poschardt (1998) as one of the final avant-gardes of the twentieth century; this article will explore and discuss the ground-breaking nature of the genre with reference to new compositional strategies and the turntable technology with which they are carried out.

When soundscape composers, documentarians and artists work with soundscapes, they are expressing relationships with the world, through their treatment of place, sounds and audience. A number of questions could be asked about these expressions about places, the ethics of these expressions, and the ways in which these ethics are informed by underlying ideologies of sound, of sound production and of sound ecology. One key question concerns a common distinction between ‘high-fidelity’ and ‘low-fidelity’. Are there some – possibly unintended or unexamined – ethical implications embedded in the dichotomisation of ‘hi-fi’ vs ‘lo-fi’ in soundscape theory? Is this really an essential or unavoidable concept and expression, or are there alternatives? One such possible alternative is found in the concept of the ecotone – a marginal zone, a transitional area or time where species from adjacent ecosystems interact. This leads us to an idea of ‘ecotonality’ that might offer a more flexible, less polarised, alternative to the hi-fi/lo-fi dichotomy. Finally, we will interrogate three themes around ideas of soundscape ’authenticity’: authenticity of place, authenticity of production and authenticity of connection.

Projects are emerging that reflect the growing concern with preservation and access to our electroacoustic heritage. In today's context it is difficult to find the huge financial means needed to facilitate a durable and efficient response to this problem. Some accessible objectives and projects are presented here which could be developed by the electroacoustic community. For a long time people have been concerned about the importance of the electroacoustic domain; the concern should now include the urgency of preservation.

By drawing concept diagrams of Smalley's seminal writings, I have attempted to show how Smalley's ideas on acousmatic music have evolved from manipulating sound objects to creating ‘space-forms’. The work Wind Chimes is analysed with respect to spectromorphology and sound shapes, and it is compared to the work Base Metals, which is analysed with respect to spectral space. A connection is then made between the evolution in writing and the evolution in composition.

This article explores listening and communications strategies that arise with a collaborative scoring system we are developing for use within improvisational contexts. Performers generate notation on a scrolling score a short time before it is played or rendered into sound. Working a short time in the future allows performers to respond to sound as they would in any improvisatory situation, and yet coordinate their activity through notation in a way typically associated with pre-composed music. The ‘Anticipatory Score’ platform supports the exploration of different kinds of relationships between performers, composers and audience members, and different listening and engagement strategies that affect the musical experience for all participants.