On reflection upon my own experience as a composer in theory and practice, I find that terms not only define but also propose. In finding words for spatial texture, I have discovered that spatial texture itself is always proposing: motion of sound suggests texture of space. The texture of space creates an elusive materiality. Form is no better than formlessness.

This article discusses the role of electroacoustic music practice in the context of human–robot interaction (HRI), illustrated by the first author’s work creating the sonic language of interactive robotic artwork Diamandini. It starts with a discussion of the role of sound in social robotics and surveys various notable conceptual approaches to robot sound. The central thesis of the article is that electroacoustic music can provide a valuable source of aesthetic considerations and creative practice for the creation of richer and more refined sonic HRIs by giving practitioners new ways to create believable sounding objects, to convey fiction, agency and animacy, and to communicate causality in auditory feedback. To demonstrate this, the authors describe the rationale for treating robot sound design as a compositional process and discuss the implications of the endeavour’s non-linear and site-specific nature. These considerations are illustrated using sound examples and design decisions made throughout the creation process of the robotic artwork. The authors conclude with observations on how the compositional process is affected by this particular application context.

Electronic systems designed to improvise with a live instrumental performer are a constant mediation of musical language and artificial decision-making. Often these systems are designed to elicit a reaction in a very broad way, relying on segmenting and playing back audio material according to a fixed or mobile set of rules or analysis. As a result, such systems can produce an outcome that sounds generic across different improvisers, or restrict meaningful electroacoustic improvisation to those performers with a matching capacity for designing improvisatory electroacoustic processing. This article documents the development of an improvisatory electroacoustic instrument for pianist Maria Donohue as a collaborative process for music-making. The Donohue+ program is a bespoke electroacoustic improvisatory system designed to augment the performance capabilities of Maria, enabling her to achieve new possibilities in live performance. Through the process of development, Maria’s performative style, within the broader context of free improvisation, was analysed and used to design an interactive electronic system. The end result of this process is a meaningful augmentation of the piano in accordance with Maria’s creative practice, differing significantly from other improvising electroacoustic instruments she has previously experimented with. Through the process of development, Donohue+ identifies a practice for instrument design that engages not only with a performer’s musical materials but also with a broader free improvisation aesthetic.

The label Mille Plateaux focuses on concepts like virtuality, noise, machinism and digitality. In the most simple case, digital music simulates something that does not exist as a reality; it generates something new. It is the result of the teamwork of numerous authorities such as the 'musician', the programmer and the authority of the software program. Today, computer digital music can be seen as screen-based music, i.e. sounds become visible and images audible, but one can often forget that there is no mutual correspondence; and that this is simply a mechanism whereby a given program secretly directs the programmer towards significant ways of performing, creating apparently absolute relationships between image and sound. On the other hand, with the increasing complexity of software, the programmer loses insight into internal communication structures. Such complex programs are full of errors and can even act on their own initiative. Programmers and musicians who navigate through today's systems function as designers. But this is less a question of the design of a program's operation surfaces but of the programming of software and the navigation by its logic. One has to discuss the medial conditions of digital music, the more user-friendly the software, the less transparent is the medium itself; i.e. the more transparent the functions of a computer or a synthesizer (say, with the use of preset sounds), the stronger the medium proves to be non-transparent. Digital music is more about opening up given program structures; internal ramifications and program hierarchies are to be discovered.

This article reports on a study to identify the new sonic challenges and opportunities for live coders, computer musicians and sonic artists using MIRLCa, a live-coding environment powered by an artificial intelligence (AI) system. MIRLCa works as a customisable worldwide sampler, with sounds retrieved from the collective online Creative Commons (CC) database Freesound. The live-coding environment was developed in SuperCollider by the author in conversation with the live-coding community through a series of workshops and by observing its use by 16 live coders, including the author, in work-in-progress sessions, impromptu performances and concerts. This article presents a qualitative analysis of the workshops, work-in-progress sessions and performances. The findings identify (1) the advantages and disadvantages, and (2) the different compositional strategies that result from manipulating a digital sampler of online CC sounds in live coding. A prominent advantage of using sound samples in live coding is its low-entry access suitable for music improvisation. The article concludes by highlighting future directions relevant to performance, composition, musicology and education.

Sound and media installations are rarely considered from a time-based, formal perspective. In order to enable a greater understanding of temporal form in sound installations, I suggest a cross-disciplinary adaptation of musical form to the installation context. Due to the differences between concert and installation presentation practices – including, but not limited to, the increased agency of the mobile visitor – I re-examine form in installation contexts as the particular temporal experience co-produced by the first-person subject as they navigate in, through and out of the work’s frame. By applying this musical perspective to macro-scale formal structures, a set of tools and concepts become available for the analysis of temporal form in existing sound or audiovisual installations. Using practice-based observation and analysis, I describe several compositional strategies through which musical concepts of material and form can be extended in space and time: each of these strategies provides means with which to shape or constrain the visitor’s co-production of experiential form. Finally, I discuss several strategies that can be used for the creation of large-scale form, with particular reference to algorithmic design principles used in my recent audiovisual installation, Room Dynamics.

This article explores how ‘noise music’ uses its influences, how it refers to them, and what occurs formally, when using influence self-consciously and formally. Specifically, it takes two artists, Nurse With Wound and The New Blockaders, that emerged at the same time as ‘industrial music’, and through different strategies, incorporated visual art influences into their work, to the point where influence as question is raised. Referring to Harold Bloom, the article notes that influence is not linear, nor is it fixed. The article begins with some general considerations about what noise is and how it works when in contact with music; it then looks in detail first at some works by Nurse With Wound, then at works by The New Blockaders. In so doing, it also pays attention to the material presentation of those works, which is a key part of the formal work of these artists. It concludes with some thoughts about how we can not only apply Bloom to experimental music, but that ‘noise music’ can provide itself as a theorisation of influence.

The history of music in the twentieth century is viewed as a process of expanding the sonic material of music to include all sound. Technological barriers to the full exploitation of the domain of sound are suggested as causing the process to take more time than it would otherwise due to cultural or aesthetic factors alone. Important historical developments in music over the last century are reconsidered to be, at least in part, strategies for circumventing technological limitations to manipulating and accessing all sound. Support for this perspective is found in the words of artists and composers of the time and in comparisons between the technologies available for creation in the visual and the sonic arts. Sound modelling is examined as a post all-sound paradigm holding promise for normalising the relationship between sound and music.

This paper describes the interactive strategies adopted during the composition and realisation of construction 3 for soprano saxophone and multiple media, by Tony Myatt and Peter Fluck. This work is an interactive multiple media composition for computer, computer-enhanced saxophone and computer graphics projected onto irregularly shaped screens. Derivation of the performer sensing system and mapping strategies to control signal processing, computer generated materials and communication gestures between the performer and computer are described. These processes include generative mapping techniques using neural networks for the recognition of gestural information and the development and application of wireless, wearable sensing technology. This work is described as a holistic approach to the derivation of performer sensing, data mapping and the application of reactive and interactive processes in the context of the creation of a new musical and multiple media composition.

This paper gives brief descriptions of five Chinese flutes: the paixiao, xun, koudi, xiao and dizi, and short musical excerpts with their notation, idiomatic phrasing and typical ornaments. The source material section describes their spectral characteristics. Following a brief description of the previous wavetable synthesis design, an expressive new Csound additive synthesis design used to model the instruments is described. Chinese notation is a convenient Csound pitch input method using Ling Lun's tuning. Finally, several excerpts from compositions illustrate applications of the designs.

The network serves as a conceptual, metaphorical, practical and musical force that drives Sustainable, a dynamic robotic sound installation. The piece is comprised of seven autonomous water gong nodes that are networked together by water tubes to distribute water throughout the system. A water resource allocation algorithm guides this distribution process and produces an ever-evolving sonic and visual texture. A simple set of behaviours govern the individual gongs, and the system as a whole exhibits emergent properties that yield local and large-scale forms in sound and light that are visually and musically compelling.

Project Arbol:Deer-B-Gone is a an outdoor sound installation of indefinite duration for twenty-three speakers. It takes on a guerrilla approach to sound installation art. Low-tech concepts and supplies, such as car amplifiers, aircraft cable, inexpensive cassette players, coupled with an overall irreverence for mainstream consumerism, created something like a Disney World theme park gone awry. The installation, which was site-specific, took place in a backyard in Princeton, New Jersey, USA. Yards and yards of cable were woven through the trees. Speakers were later mounted on the cable. Once in place, the speakers moved slowly along the cable. Each speaker played its own sound track. While there were some technical difficulties that plagued the project throughout its development and performance, overall Project Arbol proved to be a resilient installation.

What is ‘orchestral’ about a networked laptop orchestra? And what is network-like about a classical orchestra? This article juxtaposes orchestras, nineteenth-century music machines and twenty-first-century network music projects. Drawing on organology and cybernetics, it asks how these systems connect people and instruments. It considers interaction and coordination in particular networks, from the panharmonicon to PLork, but also their abstract informational topologies. Ultimately, orchestra machines, old and new, involve both technical and social organisation – and, as such, they can be used to problematise the ontological separation of technology and society.

The HIEMPA project combined a team of people with technical, artistic, environmental and cultural expertise towards an artistic outcome aiming to extend the New Zealand sonic art tradition. The work involved collecting audio samples from the aquascape of the Ruakuri Caves and Nature Reserve in Waitomo, South Waikato, New Zealand; and samples of a variety of pütorino – a New Zealand Mäori wind instrument. Following a machine learning analysis of this audio material and an analysis of the performance material, hybrid digital instruments were built and mapped to suitable hardware triggers. The new instruments are playable in realtime, along with the electroacoustic manipulation of pütorino performances. The project takes into account the environmental and cultural significance of the source material, with the results to be released as a set of compositions. This paper discusses the background research and process of the project.

Computer code is a form of notational language. It prescribes actions to be carried out by the computer, often by systems called interpreters. When code is used to write music, we are therefore operating with programming language as a relatively new form of musical notation. Music is a time-based art form and the traditional musical score is a linear chronograph with instructions for an interpreter. Here code and traditional notation are somewhat at odds, since code is written as text, without any representational timeline. This can pose problems, for example for a composer who is working on a section in the middle of a long piece, but has to repeatedly run the code from the beginning or make temporary arrangements to solve this difficulty in the compositional process. In short: code does not come with a timeline but is rather the material used for building timelines. This article explores the context of creating linear ‘code scores’ in the area of musical notation. It presents the Threnoscope as an example of a system that implements both representational notation and a prescriptive code score.

Hierarchical and other historically dominant models of perceived musical organisation are increasingly inapplicable to new musical processes and repertoire. The next major paradigm shift for music models, structures and concepts, perhaps comparable in importance to that in which polyphony gave way to homophony, may be a shift of emphasis from means of acoustic production and the nature of sound per se to new musical models based on psychoacoustics, cognitive studies and subjective auditory experience.

This essay elaborates a field of general aesthetic considerations relevant to the sonification of data. A set of dialectical tropes are introduced to define the possibility space for organised sonified data: data-in-itself and the listener-for-itself; cognitive support and sabotage; and the Peircean triad of rheme–dicisign–argument. Taken together, these three dialectical parameters elaborate a conceptual space in which strategies can be sought for mapping acoustic parameters to data features, data structure and sonic transformations, all with respect to listener reception. A work-in-progress is discussed in connection with this general aesthetic field, and considerations of the aesthetic space are applied to several works. Finally, the notion of data verité is explored in connection to ‘big data’ and issues related to the transformation of data into information generally.

The process of creating computer-based music is increasingly being conceived in terms of complex chains of mediations involving composer/performer and computer software interactions that prompt us to reconsider notions of materiality within the context of digital cultures. Recent scholarship has offered particularly useful re-evaluations of computer music software in relation to musical instrumentality. In this article, we contend that given the ubiquitous presence of computer units within contemporary musical practices, it is not simply music software that needs to be reframed as musical instruments, but rather the diverse material strata of machines identified as computers that need to be thought of as instruments within music environments. Specifically, we argue that computers, regardless of their technical specifications, are not only ‘black boxes’ or ‘meta-tools’ that serve to control music software, but are also material objects that are increasingly being used in a wide range of musical and sound art practices according to an ‘analog’ rather than ‘digital’ logic. Through a series of examples implicating both soft and hard dimensions of what constitutes computers, we provide a preliminary survey of practices calling for the need to rethink the conceptual divide between analog and digital forms of creativity and aesthetics.