Given the growing acceptance of information and communication technology (ICT) as integral to today's middle and secondary school classrooms, electroacoustic music would seem on the surface to be a central feature of the music curriculum. However, models that approximate actual practices of electroacoustic music in the classroom are rare, with many schools focusing squarely on ICT, either as tools to facilitate traditional musical contexts or to explore innovative uses of that technology. Also, with the exception of some notable recent developments, there are few initiatives to bring middle and secondary students, or their teachers, into contact with the practices of electroacoustic music communities. The purpose of this article is to explore this problematic gap between the education and electroacoustic music communities in an attempt to identify some of the issues that lie at the foundation of an effective curriculum. The position taken is that these foundational matters need to be addressed prior to any discussion of ‘best practices’ for middle and secondary electroacoustic music education.

The experimental music of Chinese musicians including Yan Jun, Li Jianhong, Jun-Y Chao, Shen Piji and the Tea Rockers Quintet embodies a particular mode of thinking rooted in Chinese qi-philosophy known as shanshui (山水)-thought, which considers nature and the environment as secret and nurturing. Shanshui-thought cultivates an existential gesture of following rather than obeying or conquering; it requires tacit resonance rather than object knowing. Shanshui-thought enables us to recognise the cosmic, aesthetic and moral values of music qualities of dan (淡) (quiet and bland) and you (幽) (inward expandedness), once described as ‘poverty’ and ‘darkness’ by the composer Christian Wolff of what he calls ascetic minimalism.

This paper describes TAO, a system for sound synthesis by physical modelling based on a new technique called cellular sound synthesis (CSS). The system provides a general mechanism for constructing an infinite variety of virtual instruments, and does so by providing a virtual acoustic material, elastic in nature, whose physical characteristics can be fine-tuned to produce different timbres. A wide variety of sounds such as plucked, hit, bowed and scraped sounds can be produced, all having natural physical and spacial qualities. Some of the musical and philosophical issues considered to be most important during the design and development of the system are touched upon, and the main features of the system are explained with reference to practical examples. Advantages and disadvantages of the synthesis technique and the prototype system are discussed, together with suggestions for future improvements.

As Jonty Harrison himself acknowledges, a significant body of acousmatic music exists which has, directly or indirectly, challenged aspects of the Schaefferian theory from which acousmatic music first developed (Harrison 1995). Few pieces, however, have so clearly and deliberately confronted Schaeffer’s notion of the ‘sound object’ as Harrison’s Unsound Objects. Harrison does more than merely reject Schaeffer’s definition of the sound object through the use of expanded compositional strategies. Rather, he both employs Schaeffer’s methodology and subverts it, systematically demonstrating the potential and the limitations of Schaeffer’s epoché and its product, the sound object. The result is what might be aptly termed the ‘unsound object’: a sonic entity which both demonstrates and defies Schaeffer’s ideals, and exemplifies the rich ambiguities which can arise from the compositional exploitation of referentiality and association, in addition to the intrinsic, morphological characteristics emphasised within Schaeffer’s reduced listening. Throughout his engagement with Schaefferian theory, however, Harrison never abandons the fundamental musical radicalism at the heart of Schaeffer’s project: positing ‘concrete sound material’, rather than ‘abstract concept’, as the basis for the language of electroacoustic music (Chion 1983: 37).

Cheryl E. Leonard is a San Francisco-based composer, performer and instrument maker who utilises sounds from natural objects and field recordings to create innovative compositions that are aesthetically appealing and also promote environmental awareness. This article examines Leonard’s work Antarctica: Music from the Ice (2009–2014), which comprises ten context-based pieces created from sounds produced with natural objects (such as penguin bones, rocks and shells) and field recordings the composer collected during her visit to Antarctica in 2008–9. In particular, the article focuses on the pieces Lullaby for E Seals, White on White, Greater than 20 Knots and Ablation Zone, showing how Leonard draws attention to pertinent environmental issues through her work, while at the same time producing compositions that are aurally pleasing and engaging for performers and listeners alike.

Fifty years down the line, the analysis of computer music is still a very complex issue, highly dependent on the identity of computer music itself: the variety of software, the lack of a common musical notation for scores, the absence or presence of computer data. This has led to the emergence of a multitude of analytical methods, including aesthesical analysis, which approaches music from the point of view of perception, and poietical analysis, which pays attention to the creative process.

This study aims to combine these two methods of analysis in order to understand the relationship between technology and the actual piece of music. The article presents a methodological approach – focused on six pieces produced at IRCAM in Paris and at CSC in Padua, between 1975 and 1985 – via an in-depth consideration of Mauro Graziani's Winter leaves, a work conceived in 1980 at the CSC using Music360. The method used consists of comparing data collected using a diversity of practices: repeated listening, the tracing of graphical schematics, sonogram and spectrogram analysis, data listing analysis. An algorithm has also been created in order to calculate the degree to which the software is exploited and to enable a comparison between the different analyses. It is hoped that this procedure will combine traditional musicological methods with new approaches suited to the medium and grounded in a thorough knowledge of computer technology and musical environments.

This article discusses how the notion of performance provides impetus for the design of interactive digital environments. These environments can ultimately be regarded as user-spaces; a condition which replaces the ‘fixed’ art-object with a configuration of interactions. Our understanding of space, as suggested by Lefevbre (2001), defines the ‘inhabitant’ as a full participant, a user, a performer of space. What is at play when the installation artist designs environments that invite performative exploration? The issue of improvised performance in the inhabiting of installation spaces is exposed. Two interactive installations by the author and works by others in the field provide a context for discussion and analysis.

One of Pierre Schaeffer’s achievements in his musical research was his proposal of the sound object as a basic unit of musical experience and his insistence on listening as a main focus of research. Out of this research grew a radical new music theory of sound-based composition. This article will draw on this extensive research to explore the spaces where this music is heard and present the claim that the space in which music is experienced is as much a part of the music as the timbral material itself. The key question here is the changes made to timbral material through acousmatic spatial listening and the subjective analysis affordance of the listeners’ placement and perspective. These consequences are studied from a phenomenological and psychoacoustic perspective and it is suggested that Schaeffer’s research on timbral and musical concepts can be extended to include spatial features.

This text deals with the difficult task of notating timbre by addressing how it can be classified, synthesised, recognised and related to visual correspondences, and then looking at the relevance of these topics for notational purposes. Timbre is understood as dependent on both spectral and time-dependent features that can be notated in ways that make sense in relation to both perception and acoustics. This is achieved by taking the starting point in Lasse Thoresen’s spectromorphological analysis. Symbols originally developed for perception-based analysis are adapted for use over a hybrid spectrum-staff system to indicate the spectral qualities of timbre. To test the system, it was used to transcribe excerpts of three classic electroacoustic music works. In addition to the benefit of being able to compare the three excerpts transcribed with the same system, there is the advantage that the visual representation is based on spectral measurable qualities in the music. The notation system’s intuitiveness was also explored in listening tests, showing that it was possible to understand spectral notation symbols placed over a staff system, particularly for examples with two sound objects instead of one.

The ‘technological revolution’ that took place in music during the twentieth century is equivalent to the revolution that took place between the twelfth and fourteenth century, which transformed musical notation into applications of technology related to creation. This second revolution, as well as the first one, concerns not only musical form, but also the social organisation related to music. The aesthetic of sound is the key factor (in all the genres of contemporary music), which is a major challenge for musical analysis. Society is reorganising itself, favouring the appropriation and amateur practices within musical creation. Musical research institutions – and particularly the GRM – develop new forms of collaboration with their audience and contribute to the constitution of a ‘horizontal’ society, based on exchange, in frank opposition with the ‘vertical’ society, based on a reduced number of producers and a large amount of consumers.

Pierre Schaeffer's notion of Arts-Relais highlights aesthetic fissures in the passage from manual to mechanical techniques of sound production, fixation and reproduction. The Arts-Relais ‘instrument’ is a case of what Walter Benjamin terms technische Reproduzierbarkeit, and there is a close resemblance between the two roles of that instrument and the two manifestations of technische Reproduzierbarkeit as expounded by Benjamin. Furthermore, the Arts-Relaisinstrument materialises the shift from ‘older handwork technology’ to that technology which, in the words of Martin Heidegger, unlocks, transforms, stores up, distributes and switches about the energies of nature, and whose essence he terms Ge-stell. Heidegger's ‘sinking of the object into the objectlessness of the standing reserve’ (a feat of Ge-stell) intersects Benjamin's ‘decline of the aura’ (a feat of technische Reproduzierbarkeit), but while the decline of the aura paves the way for art as political praxis, the sinking of the object into the objectlessness of the standing reserve elicits from Heidegger an invitation to a return to the golden age of Greek techne. Is this not praxis too? And how does Schaeffer respond to Heidegger's invitation?

As befits an Homage to Schaeffer, this essay improvises ‘new uses for things originally meant for something else’ (Schaeffer and Hodgkinson 1987: 5), according to the rule of bricolage: to make do with whatever is at hand (Lévi-Strauss 1962: 17). A new structure is invested with disused remnants of old structures (Genette 1963: 37), as practised by the savage mind, structural thinking, musique concréte and Oswald de Andrade's antropofagia (Andrade 1928). One saves up by not making it to measure at the cost of a double operation: analysis (extraction of various elements from organised ensembles) and synthesis (organisation of these elements into a new ensemble where ultimately they will be entirely detached from their original functions).

Wireless Fantasy, Vladimir Ussachevsky's 4½-minute tribute to the birth of wireless radio, utilises a rich collection of sound materials, from antique spark generators and shortwave radio sounds to a recorded segment of Wagner's Parsifal. Wireless Fantasy is here examined not as much for the cultural meaning of its sources but for insight into Ussachevsky's dramatic counterpointing of those sources in real time. The analytical methodology focuses on pitch, rhythm, and timbre equally, using both standard music notation and spectral analysis to examine the contrapuntal elements in this classic electroacoustic composition. Special attention is paid to the coincidence of accent between the source materials that generates the work's climax and to the involvement of all the sources in articulating its final cadence. The larger issue of quotation within electroacoustic composition is discussed with regard to an abstract reference in the work's coda.

This article discusses the theoretical principles governing the short time Fourier transform (STFT) and its musical applications, using the CARL phase vocoder and the Composers' Desktop Project (CDP) spectral transformations. The former was originally developed by Dolson (1986, 1991) and ported to personal computer systems by Atkins, Bentley, Henderson, Orton and Wishart (Atkins, Bentley, Endrich, Fischman, Malham, Orton and Wishart 1987, Wishart 1994a). The latter was developed by Wishart (1994b). When possible, theoretical matters are presented in a qualitative way, keeping the number and complexity of mathematical expressions within the essential requirements for those interested in musical applications. The latter are accompanied by sound examples, including excerpts from pieces by the author.

A composer who has worked in the field of computer music for the last 25 years reflects on how technological developments during that time have affected his work in computer music, instrumental music and hybrid combinations of the two. The compositional trajectories traced here often run parallel to opportunities afforded by the evolution of computer technology suitable for the generation of digital audio.

This article proposes a perspective on certain practices within experimental music based on a particular understanding of sonic materialism. By tracing correlations and marking divergences between post-spectralism, minimalism, electroacoustic music, glitch and IDM’s offshoots, this article reflects on sound-in-itself, the conception of space and time in music, poietics, perceptual and cultural factors, and suggests that there is a particular understanding of sonic materialism – which I term ecstatic-materialism – that is rooted in a synthesis of perception, theory and embodied actions.

This perspective explores a new expressivity of sound in which the sound itself is the point of convergence for creative impulses and perceptual motives, sound being the common territory between composer and listener. By developing the idea of an ecstatic-sonic-materialism, various works across different genres can be brought together according to this mutual convergence on sound that embodies acoustic properties, intimate traces, external and corporeal experiences.

This article considers the place of William W. H. ‘Bill’ Gunn in the history of electroacoustic music with a focus on one of his earliest creative forays, the 1955 production of A Day in Algonquin Park, a composition in the genre of what the authors have dubbed the circadian audio portrait. In exploring Gunn’s compositional decisions and the political and creative contexts which surrounded them, we detail his sonic practice and make the argument that Gunn was a soundscape composer before the term was coined, a forerunner of the genre indebted to composers connected with the World Soundscape Project. In doing so, we must acknowledge the ways in which the album’s creation and reception play out paradoxical aspects of the wilderness myth, while feeding into the construction of a popular and idealised Canadian identity. We also find his modernist ecological sensibility struggling to articulate a place for human visitors within nature: in this, Gunn’s outlook and concerns were not very different from some contemporary soundscape composers. However, this study goes beyond acknowledging a previously ‘unknown father’ of familiar sounds and debates; in contextualising his work with environmental sound as a contribution to the genre of the circadian audio portrait, we highlight an alternative genealogy for contemporary soundscape composition.

The prospect of being able to gain a better understanding of how the brain processes music is very exciting for musicians and developers of music technology. Composers would certainly welcome the possibility of being able to predict more objectively the effect of particular musical configurations on their audiences. Furthermore, new music technologies are bound to emerge from such understanding. Despite an impressive amount of ongoing research into the neuroscience of music, progress in this field still remains largely uncharted for musicians and unexplored by developers of technology: the literature is complex and difficult to disentangle. This paper is an attempt to chart the field for the readership of this journal. It articulates a working hypothesis for the neural basis of mental imageries elicited by music, based on the notion that such imageries are by-products of the inherent abstracting and predicting properties of the brain. It is argued that such mental imageries are scaffolds for music perception. The paper also speculates on the impact that a better understanding of the musical brain may have on the development of future technology for electroacoustic music, which may include the development of new analysis tools such as the olivogram and the thalamogram.

In this paper I try to outline a model that can bring out the meaningful relationships between ‘the instrumental’ and ‘the electronics’ in mixed music. The model is based on the semiotic square which is considered in semiotics as a powerful conceptual framework to examine the relationships between two terms (S1/S2) and their negative (non-S1/non-S2), terms which can be characters, situations, actions, concepts, etc. Two paradigmatic axes represent the relations between the actors of mixed music: the sources (instrumental and electronic) on the one hand, and the manipulations (real-time processing and sound projection) on the other. According to the semiotic square, the relations inside the environment are defined in terms of contrariety, contradiction and complementarity. This model allows us to start out with a purely technological description of the ‘mixed music’ genre and of individual pieces, with the advantage of a pre-operative analysis of the system. It describes the immanent structure of the environments and releases the potential interactions between the instrumental and the electronics of mixed music. These interactions are examined, from a paradigmatic point of view, with numerous representative pieces of mixed music from the twentieth century.

The design and development of a layered Web architecture for Malaysian music can be applied as a model of Web architecture for music education, specifically for the introduction of the music of a particular country or region. The model is designed and developed in two phases: the building of the subject architecture and the design and development of the application architecture. The complete Web architecture is analysed and tested to determine its suitability for delivery of music-related content. Research findings indicate that the Web architecture is reliable, efficient and suitable for its purpose. The classification scheme proposed is found to provide a firm foundation for the building of the Web architecture. In conclusion, the prototype model provides a suitable extensible platform for the delivery of music content, which may be packaged for the purpose of education.

Through a discussion of the installation piece, The Trade / Oro por Baratijas, we address the theoretical issues behind the development of ecologically based compositional work. We discuss whether ecologically based music can be studied using linguistic tools. The concepts of potentiality and actuality are situated within the perspective of individual–environment interactions. A process that describes the relationship between an individual and his specific social context is proposed: the personal environment. Consistency is discussed in relation to environmental sound listening processes and ecological modelling work. The first part of the paper concludes by suggesting that form-creation is dynamically determined by a process of mutual adaptation between listener and environment. The second part focuses on compositional methods and contextual elements as they are used in The Trade. This work has been developed through a multilevel approach where visual and sonic materials stem from social and historical issues. The organisational processes of the sound piece are based on the micro-temporal and spectral properties suggested by the visual elements in the installation. The meso-temporal dynamic is organised through ecologically constrained events. The macro-structural shape and the sources used in the piece make reference to a specific historical context, i.e. the conquest of the American continent by the European armies during the first half of the sixteenth century.