The capacity for electroacoustic music to project and manipulate sonic images is now acknowledged as a cornerstone of the medium's aesthetic potential. The notion of imagery may be used in a range of ways, reflecting electroacoustic music's potential to present sound ‘documents’ re-contextualised from real-world experience, as well as to project more abstract entities in which the concept of an image may give coherent form to fantastical constructs, frequently driven by the transforming and distortive effects of signal processing. This paper investigates the practical application of these distinctions in electroacoustic music, largely through reflective discussion of the author's own working methods, and evaluates ways in which the aesthetic effects of signal processing can influence the nature and construction of sound images. Within this, Denis Smalley's concept of the indicative field is used as a conceptual tool for the characterisation and analysis of the affective dimensions of sound image construction and manipulation.

Approaches to the multichannel spatialisation of electroacoustic music are described here with reference to musical case studies which focus upon the expressive functions of space and the theatricality of sound diffusion in an acousmatic context. A site-specific approach to spatialisation is proposed to enhance theatrical aspects of musical performance. Case studies include proposals for novel layouts of the diffusion system within the performance space and compositional techniques that are designed to re-evaluate our understanding of individual listening spaces.

This paper describes the background and motivations behind the author’s electroacoustic game-pieces Pathfinder (2016) and ICARUS (2019), designed specifically for his performance practice with an augmented drum kit. The use of game structures in music is outlined, while musical expression in the context of commercial musical games using conventional game controllers is discussed. Notions such as agility, agency and authorship in music composition and improvisation are in parallel with game design and play, where players are asked to develop skills through affordances within a digital game-space. It is argued that the recent democratisation of game engines opens a wide range of expressive opportunities for real-time game-based improvisation and performance. Some of the design decisions and performance strategies for the two instrument-controlled games are presented to illustrate the discussion; this is done in terms of game design, physical control through the augmented instrument, live electronics and overall artistic goals of the pieces. Finally, future directions for instrument-controlled electroacoustic game-pieces are suggested.

The conceptual starting point for an ‘action–sound approach’ to teaching music technology is the acknowledgment of the couplings that exist in acoustic instruments between sounding objects, sound-producing actions and the resultant sounds themselves. Digital music technologies, on the other hand, are not limited to such natural couplings, but allow for arbitrary new relationships to be created between objects, actions and sounds. The endless possibilities of such virtual action–sound relationships can be exciting and creatively inspiring, but they can also lead to frustration among performers and confusion for audiences. This paper presents the theoretical foundations for an action–sound approach to electronic instrument design and discusses the ways in which this approach has shaped the undergraduate course titled ‘Interactive Music’ at the University of Oslo. In this course, students start out by exploring various types of acoustic action–sound couplings before moving on to designing, building, performing and evaluating both analogue and digital electronic instruments from an action–sound perspective.

The expression gestural mapping is well imbedded in the language of instrument designers, describing the function from interface control parameters to synthesis control parameters. This function is in most cases implicitly assumed to be instantaneous, so that at any time its output depends only on its input at that time. Here more general functions are considered, in which the output depends on the history of input, especially functions that behave like physical dynamic systems, such as a damped resonator. Acoustic instruments are rich in dynamical behaviour. Introducing dynamics at the control stage of an electronic instrument can help compensate for lack of dynamics in later non-physical synthesis stages. A broadening of the function space offers new aesthetic possibilities for composing instruments. Examples are presented to illustrate the new design/composition mode as well as practical techniques. In this context, it is suggested that the word mapping be updated with the more descriptive expression dynamic control processing.

This article proposes a narrative theory thought in terms that are specific to sound practice. It addresses two different fields – Acousmatic Music and Foley Art – as a possibility of understanding sound narration and conceptualising it around the idea of fiction. To this end, it begins from the concepts of sound-motif, sound-prop and sound-actors, in order to propose a dramaturgic practice specific to sound terms.

The theory of sound dramaturgy acquires a practical outline by making use of multichannel constellations as a composition strategy, with specific loudspeaker arrangements. The theory advocates loudspeakers as the mediators of the experience and the stage as part of the audience’s assembly. This translates into a practice of staging sound fiction, which focuses on formulating a conjecture based on formal and factual structures, allowing for a direct relationship between the listener and the listening, between the sounds and their fictional location.

A corpus of historical electronic art music is available online from the UbuWeb art resource site. Though the corpus has some flaws in its historical and cultural coverage (not least of which is an over-abundance of male composers), it provides an interesting test ground for automated electronic music analysis, and one which is available to other researchers for reproducible work. We deploy open source tools for music information retrieval; the code from this project is made freely available under the GNU GPL 3 for others to explore. Key findings include the contrasting performance of single summary statistics for works versus time series models, visualisations of trends over chronological time in audio features, the difficulty of predicting which year a given piece is from, and further illumination of the possibilities and challenges of automated music analysis.

I have had a major interest in the performance practice issues in electronic and interactive systems over the years (see, for example, Kimura 1996). As a performer/composer often presenting pieces from the classical and other contemporary acoustic violin literature in traditional settings along with electronic works, and also as a teacher of interactive computer music performance at a conservatory where my students include highly trained performers, performance practice issues in computer music come up very frequently in association with the creative process. I tend to focus on creating MaxMSP patches that address a particular musical context or situation, rather than creating an elaborate versatile and reusable MaxMSP patch and then using that patch in a particular way to make music. This paper describes a few examples of my interest in this area: (i) System Aspects: Performance Practice Issues and Room Acoustics; (ii) ‘Pragmatic’ Programming and Performance of Interactive Music; and (iii) Creative Process and Interactive Computer Music.

The article tries to explain different aspects of sound art in public space in the context of an understanding of a modified language of twentieth-century visual art and music. It gives a description of different approaches to colouring situations and contexts with sound. Various examples of sonification and artistic treatments in our surrounding are shown. It shows an artistic practice which is linked to social-cultural aspects and their critical role in art. Therefore sound installations are placed into a genealogy of installation practice in public space.

The design and construction of an organised sound space to support information representations in the human–computer interface is described. The design of the sound space is guided by four principles which match perceptual structure with data structure to improve natural comprehension of an auditory display. These principles – completeness, comprehensibility, consistency, and cohesiveness – have been generalised from the use of colour displays in scientific visualisation. The choice of perceptual parameters to represent different types of data is informed by the body of psychoacoustic literature. The raw material for the construction of the sound space is the McGill University Master Samples (MUMS) palette of musical instrument samples. This is an important choice because this reference resource enables reproduction and confirmation of the results. The construction was carried out in four stages – the ‘pedestal’, the ‘skin’, the ‘skeleton’ and the ‘flesh’. The pedestal consists of eight equally discriminable timbres organised in a circle by perceptual similarity. The skin is the boundary of variation in the space, defining the limits of dynamic range for pitch and brightness at each timbre. The skeleton characterises the internal behaviour of the space at a number of perceptually measured points. The flesh is a continuous medium moulded to the skeleton and skin, realised by a three-dimensional (3D) regularised linear spline interpolation. The concrete realisation of the sound space can be investigated through a user interface, called the GamutExplorer. Colour visualisations of slices and wireframe views of the 3D space can be chosen, and sounds can be picked with a mouse.

Drawing on field research carried out in the abandoned villages of the Ara Valley, this article seeks to readdress notions of acoustic community and communication in terms of a ‘haptic aurality’ in which listening, as a mode of touch, approximates a figure of spacing, fragmentation and withdrawal in contrast to more conventional communicational models of intimacy, presence and exchange. Arguing that soundscape compositions present an ‘acoustic ontology’, the article explores a form of belonging and being that is, following Jean-Luc Nancy, singular plural in which sound signals ‘unwork’ collectivities through the processes of ‘sharing’ and ‘splitting’ (partage) characteristic of listening and recording. Referring to the work of writer W.G. Sebald (1944–2001), whose hybrid ‘literary ethnography’ was the impetus for my own soundwalks and fieldwork, and considering the role of soundscape composition within the discipline of Trauma Studies, the article scopes out to consider the possibilities of soundscape composition as a form of testimony in light of Agamben's (1999) insistence that testimony is necessarily incomplete. As a form of ‘myopic witnessing’ (Jenckes 2010), the sonic memories of ruined soundscapes are presented as spacings and absences, fragments and lacunae, that are themselves characteristic of both the ontology of ruins and those of testimony.

The views of categorisation presented in this paper along with my own are for the purpose of providing background for current taxonomic projects related to electroacoustic music (e.g. EARS: ElectroAcoustic Resource Site). The views might be summarised as top-down (ontology) as described in Peterson, bottom-up (folksonomy) as described in Shirkey and Weinberger, and a view from the middle ground (TagOntology) as described in Gruber. Semantic Wikipedia enters this discourse in relation to what one might call folk-ontology. It is crucial to conduct experimentation with minimal specifications and practical methodologies in order to facilitate the interoperability of dynamic, emergent knowledge bases within the Semantic Web context.

This article aims to sketch a theory of sound sculpture, one that would explain the variety of forms this artistic practice might take on and define it in relation to other art forms. My hypothesis is that in order to do this we must focus on the traits of sound sculpture connecting it to music rather than on those separating the two. A useful instrument to analyse this connection is Harry Partch’s concept of corporeal music. In contrast to Western classical music, which he viewed as abstract and devoid of life, Partch envisioned a music that would emphasise the physicality of sound-making and engage the listener on a more visceral level. Investigating a number of works from all parts of the sound sculpture spectrum, I argue that all the various practices that comprise the art form present the core traits of Partch’s musical ideal (physicality of music, audience engagement, and unity of the sonic and the visual) to a substantial extent. Analysing sound sculpture in light of its connection to music brings to the fore a number of musical issues for which this new art form provides a new perspective. Among these are the agency of the composer and the listener, the function and nature of a score, as well as the role of technology in music-making. These issues, along with the general idea of corporeality of music, compose a discourse that transcends the boundaries of different subgenres of sound sculpture, allowing for theorisation of the art form as a whole.

This paper examines the use of soundscape elements and mimetic sound-identities in the music of Denis Smalley. It attempts to reconcile these elements with the acousmatic tradition from which his music emerges, illustrating that it does not represent a contradiction, but rather a refined aesthetic where spectromorphological and soundscape concerns relate in symbiosis. A close look at key works, including Empty Vessels (1997), Valley Flow (1992) and Pentes (1974), reveals how these elements manifest themselves in his work, and how the spectromorphological and soundscape aspects of these pieces work together toward shared goals.

This paper looks at microsound – an emergent term, corresponding concept and associated genre of experimental electronica appearing in the late 1990s – which animates the idea of sound as material entity, and, as I will demonstrate, ultimately complicates and expands questions concerning disciplinary boundaries. The conceptualisation of sounds as having mass or as matter, particularly on an imagined ‘atomic’ level as is implicit in microsound, has had many historical antecedents, especially in the twentieth century. However, the comparison, representation and analogy of sound as an object of material composition is a peculiar metaphor as sound has no inherent material substance. At the meeting point of microsound, a wide spectrum of musicians and listeners across genres and subgenres has converged, along with a diverse range of technologies and approaches to those technologies. In what follows, an exploration of the inception and implications of microsound will offer one instructive path that helps elucidate the intertwined relationship between sound art and experimental electronica. Thus, this paper adds to the critical dialogue regarding these complex yet drastically under-theorised fields of creative activity by using microsound to articulate specific points of connection, commonality and divergence.

This article explores a particular perspective, shared across various contemporary musical currents, that focuses on sound itself as a complex entity. Through the analysis of certain fundamental musical elements and sonic characteristics, this study develops a new method for comparing different genres characterised by a similar approach to sound. Using the benefits of audio, spectra and score examinations, this strategy is applied to post-spectralist and minimalist compositions (e.g. G. F. Haas, B. Lang, R. Nova, G. Verrando), as well as glitch, electronic and basic-channel style pieces (Pan Sonic, R. Ikeda, Raime). Nine musical attributes are identified that help trace a new outlook on various currents in today’s music. The study’s contribution lies in its revealing of a shared musical perspective between different artistic practices, and in the establishment of new connections between pieces that belong to unrelated contexts.

This article examines the early reception of Pierre Schaeffer’s theoretical work in Quebec through the teaching of Marcelle Deschênes, principal author of the first electroacoustic theory and ear training curricula at both Université Laval and Université de Montréal. An account of Deschênes’s educational career is provided, along with remarks on the contents of her early courses in Morpho-typology and her listening workshops for children, using newly excavated primary material from her private archives. While existing scholarship presumes that Schaefferian thinking arrived in Quebec with the ‘orthodox’ acousmatic approach of Francis Dhomont, this article asserts that a pluralist and multidisciplinary interpretation of Schaeffer’s work can be discerned which pre-dated Dhomont’s teaching and has had an equally lasting impact overall. A methodological argument is also made for including education and other forms of ‘reproductive labour’ in the history of electroacoustic music.

In this paper the authors outline a phenomenological approach to the description of acoustic images, arguing that the visualist dimensions of acousmatic experiences can be a vital component to the meaning and intent of sonic works.

Working on Analogique B in the late 1950s, Xenakis formulated the ‘hypothesis of a second order sonority’. This paper focuses on this concept, and shows its crucial meaning in the composition of a number of pieces, such as Concret PH, Analogique B and the very recent Gendy3 and S709. The perspective taken is twofold: on one side, the problem of 2nd-order sonorities is seen as a problem in modelling perceptual attributes (or timbre) of sound in terms of ‘emergent properties of organised sound structure’. This is also related to the composer’s pioneering work with granular sound representations and nonstandard methods of sound synthesis. On the other, the issue is discussed in conjunction with Xenakis’ attempt at implementing thoroughly formalised ‘mechanisms’ or ‘systems’ based on the mathematics of stochastic processes. The paper shows that the issue touched on here is essential to the aesthetics of Xenakis’ electroacoustic music. It also questions whether the formalisation of stochastics is a suitable means to let 2nd-order sonorities emerge from the internal life of the sound matter. The limitations of Xenakis’ ‘mechanisms’ are described in terms of their cybernetics, and are situated in the context of artistic and scientific paradigm shifts concerning the relationship between order, disorder and chaos.