Standard histories of electronic music tend to trace the lineage of musique concrète as lying mainly in the Futurists’ declarations of the 1910s, through Cage’s ‘emancipation’ of noise in the 1930s, to Schaeffer’s work and codifications of the late 1940s and early 1950s. This article challenges this narrative by drawing attention to the work of filmmakers in the 1930s that foreshadowed the sound experiments of Pierre Schaeffer and thus offers an alternative history of their background. The main focus of the article is on the innovations within documentary film and specifically the sonic explorations in early British documentary that prefigured musique concrète, an area ignored by electronic music studies. The theoretical and philosophical underpinnings of the documentary movement’s members, particularly their leader John Grierson, will be compared with those of Pierre Schaeffer, and the important influence of Russian avant-garde filmmaking on the British (and musique concrète) will be addressed. Case studies will focus on the groundbreaking soundtracks of two films made by the General Post Office Film Unit that feature both practical and theoretical correspondences to Schaeffer: 6.30 Collection (1934) and Coal Face (1935). Parallels between the nature and use of technologies and how this affected creative outputs will also be discussed, as will the relationship of the British documentary movement’s practice and ideas to post-Schaefferian ‘anecdotal music’ and the work of Luc Ferrari.

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.

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.

This article explores timescales within absolute and psychological times, and identifies the many factors that affect our perception of time passing and estimation of durations, which inevitably influence our perception of musical structures; in particular, it discusses listening experiences, and theoretical approaches to psychological states and emotional responses. It proposes a process according to which the time-influencing factors operate between listener and music. The discussion is approached through the lens of the electroacoustic composer and makes references to short excerpts from the author’s work and related repertoire. However, as the article discusses time in relation to sound structures, it is also relevant to other time-based sound art and music.

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.

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.

In his work Contropasso (1998–9) Michelangelo Lupone collaborates with Massimo Moricone in the dance showcase piegapiaga achieving direct interaction between dancers and live electronics performance. The choreography takes advantage of acoustic events as generated by three dancers and further elaborated on via computer by the composer through use of granular algorithms and digital filtering, allowing the construction of the musical events to occur in real time. The live electronics performer changes sound parameters in relation to the dancers' movements by use of the program SDP – Sonorous Drawing Plane (S. Lanzalone) – created specifically for the control of different synthesis algorithms allowing them to be processed on systems such as Fly30 (CRM) and Mars (IRIS). SDP reads and converts computer mouse data as the operator creates lines corresponding to performance gestures, thus creating both visible and audible output. This software allows a single gesture to control more than one parameter, thus creating complex changes in the audio programme output. The article deals with different compositions, performances and didactic situations the author has experienced using SDP.

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.

Denis Smalley devoted himself to the elaboration of a method based on the analysis of spectral transformations by connoting sonorous motions and adopting metaphors borrowed from non-musical contexts. While considering Smalley's earlier theorising within the context of past and contemporary research, this paper focuses on the use of non-musical models in spectromorphological design in order to show how sonorous qualities, imaginative factors and extra-musical meanings concurred in defining new cognitive itineraries and in extending the terminology adopted, thereby establishing the basis of a new compositional approach.

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.

Four compositions for cello and string quartet on tape by American intermedia artist Phill Niblock originating from 1974 to 2003 are discussed. The interdependence of compositional approach and available technology is considered, leading to the observation that the electronic music composer's technique is considerably independent of the available technology. Where a dependence of artistic development on factors not originally musical has to be acknowledged, these nonmusical factors lie not so much in the technology but in Niblock's interpretation of it. This is discussed within the context of philosophical observations on art and technology by Theodor W. Adorno, Martin Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer.

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.

We discuss John Locke's ideas in his essay of 1690 on sound and its cognition and relation to bodily motion. The ideas have interesting implications for the construction of organised sound. We argue that our ecological and statistical experience of sounds in our natural (and man-made) environment is in several respects critical for our choices as soundsmiths and our impressions as listeners. Sonic repetition, both sensory and imag(in)ed, contributes to that environment. Input sounds may be ‘coupled’ to output sounds; and in some cases the physical processes generating sound and the cognitive processes of receiving them are joined. As music technologists we may think of the computer, our sonic vehicle, as a joined bodily sonic-prosthesis. ‘Simple’ sonic ideas may associate with each other through shared biological bases, and become tools for creation of ‘complex’ ideas, as Locke cogitates. Furthermore, we now have new routes towards such complex sounds, including our computer prostheses.

Radio and memory form a radical coupling, stitching together musical cultures with personal psychologies. I pursue such relations in Phantom Music by focusing on, and unpacking a project I developed for exhibition in 2005. The project, Phantom Radio, is based on forming a library of radio memory. Collecting stories from 105 individuals from around the world, the library consists of written statements and CDs of all the songs mentioned. Through the project, questions of broadcast technology, and the work of memory, are brought forward. To pursue such questions, the following article maps out the territory explored in the project. Reflecting on various threads, from habits of listening to the effects of music on individual lives, leads to a tracing out of the ‘phantasmic’ and the ‘social’ aspects of radio. And further, how music supplies a form of shared ground to the individual instances of unexpected experiences.

The ability to create a virtual world in computer code and implement audio that will follow the physical laws of that real world provides enormous flexibility to the composers working in the computer game industry. The multiple layers of sound that are nonlinear, interactive and dynamically mixed and effected in real time, place this media well outside the restrictions of traditional film, television and music and allow for experiences difficult to create in a more traditional real-world setting. The process of designing a broad concept audio environment for a computer game world can become a blueprint for the creation of a surround sound experience that has many similarities to sound installation practice. Creation and implementation of the sound content, the way in which it becomes interactive and the rules that drive the dynamic mixing are the processes by which the artist defines his or her vision of the final sound work. This paper aims to approach the use of a ‘next generation’ game console as a sound installation space, and discusses the ways in which a virtual audio environment created for a computer game is similar to a more traditional installation space. There are very real limitations for the implementation of soundscapes on computer game consoles, but a balance to these limitations is the capabilities of the surround sound hardware, support of powerful 3D audio engines and accessibility to a wide and diversified audience.

Original and transformed samples of berimbau, cuica and zunidores sounds, instruments typical of Brazilian folk music, as well as synthesised sounds that emulate spectro-morphological variations of the sounds of these instruments, were assembled into the library of electronic sounds used in Coelho de Souza's Concerto for Computer and Orchestra. This approach had strong implications for the cultural identity of the piece and for the strategies of integration of the computer with the orchestra.

Mirror-Rite is a work for ‘meta-trumpet’, computer and live electronics. The composition is neither notated nor stored, but forms itself as a complex of rule-based structures, transformations and processes around the improvisation of a live performer, its source of both energy and material. This article discusses the ways in which these algorithms deal with interactivity and projection in time, and how the handling of these aspects might permit the assembly of algorithmic elements into a complex dynamic whole, sensitive to (and existing solely within) present circumstances, but demonstrating unity between different performances.

One main issue in the field of algorithmic composition is the relationship between the algorithm and the final musical structure. This article investigates that relationship further and presents a method of algorithmic thinking in which the musical form is the starting point. Kimon, an object-oriented programming environment for computer-aided composition in which one creates abstractions of musical form, will be introduced. The aim is to take algorithmic composition closer to the musical output in order to work systematically with form and dramaturgy. An electroacoustic piece that has been conceived and generated in its entirety by the system will also be presented.