This article shows how the theremin as a new musical medium enacted a double logic throughout its century-old techno-cultural life. On the one hand, in an attempt to be a ‘better’ instrument, the theremin imitated or remediated traditional musical instruments and in this way affirmed the musical values these instruments materialised; simultaneously, by being a new and different medium, with unprecedented flexibility for designing sound and human–machine interaction, it eroded and challenged these same values and gradually enacted change. On the other hand, the theremin inadvertently inaugurated a practice of musical instrument circulation using electronics schematics that allowed for the instrument’s reproduction, starting with the publication of schematics and tutorials in amateur electronics magazines and which can be seen as a predecessor to today’s circulation of open source code. This circulation practice, which I call instrument-code transduction, emerged from and was amplified by the fame the theremin obtained using its touchless interface to imitate or remediate traditional musical instruments, and in turn, this circulation practice has kept the instrument alive throughout the decades. Thus remediation and code-instrument transduction are not just mutually dependent, but are in fact, two interdependent processes of the same media phenomenon. Drawing from early reactions to the theremin documented in the press, from new media theory, and from publications in amateur electronics, this article attempts to use episodes from the history of the theremin to understand the early and profound changes that electric technologies brought to the concept of musical instruments at large.

This article explores the accessibility of acousmatic compositional approaches to sound and installation art. Principally of concern is the consideration of intimacy to create a means of ‘connecting’ with an audience. Installations might be said to explore ideas of intimacy in two ways which increase accessibility for the installation visitor: through cultivating installation–visitor relationships, and through encouraging visitor–visitor relationships. A variety of ways in which various acousmatic compositional techniques relating to intimacy might be brought to bear on and operate as a way of drawing a listener into a work are explored, in particular as they relate to the consideration of space and spatial relationships. These include recording techniques, types of sound materials chosen, and the creation of particular spatial environments and listening conditions. Along with a number of instances of sound art provided by way of examples, my ongoing GRIDs series of sound sculptures will provide a case study of works related to an acousmatic aesthetic where these concerns find an outlet.

Music composition is traditionally regarded as an act of individual creation and expression, but can be approached, through the aid of digital platforms, as an activity that encourages learning through social participation. This article describes the development of a tablet-based app, Paynter, intended as a digital graphic interface for group collaborative composition and its experimental use in a primary school in Salford, UK, alongside musicians from the BBC Philharmonic orchestra. The app created a framework for a negotiated language of symbols used by two groups of students at Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2 to tell stories through sound and music. Its functionality enabled compositional thinking to emerge collectively from groups with relatively little exposure to the idea of composing and little knowledge of traditional notational or digital sequencing technologies. The research is grounded in a theoretical context of constructivist approaches to education.

The history of sonic arts is charged with transgressive practices that seek to expose the social, aural and cultural thresholds across various listening experiences, posing new questions in terms of the dialogue between listener and place. Recent work in sonic art exposes the need for an experiential understanding of listening that foregrounds the use of new personal technologies, environmental philosophy and the subject–object relationship. This paper aims to create a vocabulary that better contextualises recent installations and performances produced within the context of everyday life, by researchers and artists at the Sonic Arts Research Centre at Queen's University Belfast.

Modalys-ER is a graphical environment for creating physical model instruments and generating musical sounds with them. While Modalys-ER provides users with a relatively simple-to-use interface, it has only limited methods for mapping control data onto model parameters for performance. While these are sufficient for many interesting applications, they do not bridge the gap from high-level specifications such as MIDI files or Standard Western Notation (SWN) down to low-level parameters within the physical model. With this issue in mind, a part of Modalys-ER has now been ported to OpenMusic, providing a platform for developing more sophisticated automation and control systems that can be specified through OpenMusic's visual programming interface. An overview of the MfOM library is presented and illustrated with several musical examples using some early mapping designs. Also, some of the issues relating to building and controlling virtual instruments are discussed and future directions for research in this area are suggested. The first release is now available via the IRCAM Software Forum.

Most accounts of rhythm focus on notions of duration, pulse and metre, to explore the practices and constructs by which those involved in music performances co-ordinate their involvement. Yet there is a significant body of musical practice where sounds co-habit in time, without the same sorts of constraints found in metric co-ordination: from the gentle singing of Joseph Beuys during his Action Piece I Like America and America Likes Me, to Paul McCartney's song ‘Blackbird’. This is similar, say, to the improvisation practice of composer and trombonist George Lewis in his work with the computer programme Voyager. Starting from some ideas laid out by Gaston Bachelard and Gregory Bateson, and recent writings on critical post-humanism, this paper explores ways of considering ecologies of sounds in time, and their consequences for human musical experience.

The authors describe various experiences regarding the use of sonic materials from local musical cultures and soundscapes in the field of electroacoustic music as applied to the creative documentary. The introduction concentrates on the general characteristics of the process of ‘globalisation’ now underway and on the various different interpretations of it that have been developed over the last fifteen years.

A number of methodological and ethical questions are then asked in relation to the debate regarding the global/local dichotomy in the context of electroacoustic and audiovisual elaboration, especially when phonic material originating from the most varied geographic-cultural areas is artistically restructured and reconfigured.

In the third part of the article the accent is placed on the personal experiences of the authors regarding the production of pieces of electroacoustic music and documentaries realised in Morocco, China and Lapland.

In the last section the article concentrates on a possible diachronic perspective (i.e. studying a phenomenon in its passage through time) by means of which one can come to a relationship with soundscape sounds, and some sonic and visual examples from works realised in Catania and London are supplied.

This article is the final stage of seven years of research dedicated to understanding the theoretical backgrounds of Brazilian electroacoustic music in which a significant amount of data was gathered from a series of questionnaires and interviews with Brazilian composers. Our research focuses mainly on the influence of what we have called the historical matrices: musique concrète, elektronische musik and computer music. We were able to determine to some extent how much each of these matrices weigh on the poetic and poiesis of the Brazilian electroacoustic production. We were also able to shed some light on how (and if) Brazilian composers relate to these matrices aesthetically and if their relation to them is merely technical, as well as trying to understand how clear cut the borders are between these two aspects of musical creation. The concepts of oppositional culture (Ogbu 1978) and established and outsiders (Elias and Scotson 2000) also helped us understand the dynamics between academia and a certain anti-academic stance seen in some composers of the genre. Using these same concepts, we elaborate, in a final note, on some brief comments about a newer generation of composers who, due to various aspects, were filtered out during the early methodological stages.

this paper explains the concept, technology and reality of the sound installation adsonore. the important aspects of adsonore are that it is interactive, continuously changing, permanent and located in a public space. the functioning of the human immune system lies behind its interactive design, the real-time sound processes and the physical construction. adsonore is therefore directly related to the building in which it is housed – a new building for biological basic research.

The use of video as a performance medium, concentrating on interactive digital video used synchronously with realtime interactive audio, is outlined. Specifically, the author's experiments with realtime video in Macromind Director and in Opcode's Max are explored, working with motion-sensing systems in performance environments. A number of experimental pieces using sonic and visual environments driven by realtime motion-sensing performance systems are described, using Max to re-map incoming sensing data and using Macromind Director to control MIDI sequences, digital sound files, and digital video in realtime. Some of the compositional challenges presented by realtime systems are also explored, particularly the compositional issues arising from the addition of video into the (real)time domain. The author's current work in the development of a CD-ROM published in 1996 is also explored. The CD-ROM attempts to provide a genuine degree of interaction significantly more sophisticated than the usual point-and-click navigation, allowing the viewer a degree of creativity in his or her interaction with the material.

This article proposes an analytical perspective on the aural analysis of human–machine interaction. Starting from Pierre Schaeffer’s musical thinking, it focuses on the perception of sound morphologies that generate from human–machine interaction. This interaction, usually interpreted under the perspective of the devices and technological innovation, will be interpreted through the perspective of musical perception and semantics. In the article, the author applies the criterion of ‘allure’, that permits the analysis of the sound object’s sustain and indicates the sound agent as mechanical, living or natural. ‘Allure’ is used as a theoretical framework for the analysis of human–computer interaction (HCI) in music. Inspired by a hypothetical perceptive Turing’s test, the author employs the ‘allure’ criterion as a conceptual tool for an aural analysis of human–machine interaction: aural analysis can indeed reveal the interaction of sound agents through the cognitive mechanism of motor imagery. This approach can be extended and developed in music information retrieval. The author will develop this reflection showing the actuality of Schaeffer’s perspective in HCI analysis. Finally, to highlight the interaction between human and electronic sound sources, the author will consider a case study: the first movement of Traiettoria for piano and electronics by Marco Stroppa.

The role of spatial design in music has become more prominent in recent years,mostly because of the affordability of powerful software and hardware tools.Although spatial audio tools are widely used nowadays in studios and concerthalls, there are only few examples of robust and comfortable wearable soundsystems with a suitable acoustic response. A wireless body-worn loudspeakerprototype featuring original costume elements, a hybrid full-range loudspeakerarray and an improved acoustic response was designed and implemented. The size,shape and acoustic performance of the prototype was optimised using datagathered from anechoic measurements and interviews with performers andaudiences. Future developments of this project will consider the implementationof an extended multi-channel performance platform to explore sonic and spatialrelationships created by several wearable devices on stage synchronised with amulti-loudspeaker diffusion system.

This article examines creative sound practitioners who audibly convey social justice commentary through their use of environmental soundscapes as source material. I discuss how micro-watt radio pioneer Mbanna Kantako, electronic music artist Muqata’a and audio activist Christopher DeLaurenti work with field recordings to produce subversive counter-narratives against news media and state discourses. I outline three specific sound projects as case studies: Kantako’s aural counter-surveillance of police encounters within the predominantly poor and Black neighbourhood of Springfield, Illinois; Muqata’a’s album Inkanakuntu (2018) composed using field recordings of Ramallah, West Bank; and DeLaurenti’s radio piece Fit the Description (2015) that incorporates field recordings of the protests following the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. I argue that composing with soundscapes of contested urban spaces can function as sonic activism that confronts the oppressive soundscapes of systemic racism. The case studies are examined through the following common themes: 1) the use of what I term aural counterpublics to amplify marginalised voices and soundscapes of resistance, and 2) the radical re-appropriation of microphones and oppressive police and military audio technologies as a means of ‘speaking back’ to systems of power. Finally, I suggest how these case studies convey the need for intersectional and decolonised approaches to soundscape studies.

This article will, in a broad sense, discuss technology-based music from its early radio beginnings to the current participation practices, and seek to place both technical and musical development within broader trends of social development. The introduction of new technologies in industry, composition, mediation and consumption has, in a lasting manner, changed the way most of us listen to, participate in and make use of music in our daily lives. Electronic aesthetics has finally, following a development of nearly a hundred years, started to fulfil its initial promise of becoming widely accepted and popular outside of the narrow circles of musical expertise – a ‘democratic’ music unhindered by the hierarchies of the fine arts in their different configurations. But has it really fulfilled the original promise? Is it rather not so that both the music and its promise have changed over the years?

One thing is certain, our pre-adaption to aesthetic experiences has undergone extreme changes over the last twenty years or so. A paradigm shift brought about by digital media and distribution, as well as the networking of things, has directed large parts of humanity towards a new existence in the cross-section of technology and humanity, an existence where cyborgian qualities increase day by day.

Vector base amplitude panning (VBAP) is a new method for soundscape creation. It generalises the pair-wise panning paradigm to the triplet-wise panning paradigm, which can be used in three-dimensional loudspeaker setups. Similar soundscapes can be created with differing numbers of loudspeakers in different positions. The VBAP implementation in Csound synthesis software presented in this paper is a powerful tool for producing generic soundscapes. Virtual sources are positioned by defining the virtual source directions as (azimuth, elevation) pairs; the loudspeaker setup is defined in the initial settings. Virtual sources can be moved in three different ways: they can be moved along a polyline between specified directions, angular velocities can be applied to them, or their directions can be controlled arbitrarily.

The applications of technology in instrument design contribute to the resulting sound on many levels, particularly in the context of new evolutions representing the traditional instruments of our culture. Materials technology is seldom given consideration in the description of Western string instruments, but our choices of woods, metals and synthetics can dramatically alter the sound without altering the substance of instrumental performance. In the design of modified string instruments which mimic features of natural acoustic predecessors, new technology is applied on many levels. A taxonomy is proposed for the past, present and future of instrument design. Due consideration is given to the music which results from the new sound world, especially that involving interactive electronic processing. The advantages and disadvantages of directions in instrument design for the future are evaluated within the proposed schema. Some extended techniques on the cello are proposed to be further extended with electronics, and audio examples and descriptions are provided. A model for future collaborations between composer, performer and engineer is proposed.