This article may be considered the outline of an ongoing study of different types of structural concepts, and their referential or non-referential content, in electroacoustic, computer and mixed music composed mostly in French electroacoustic music studios (GRM, IRCAM, UPIC, GMEM, etc.). This analytical study began in Hungary in 1988, in the course of a broadcast series on certain chapters of the history of electroacoustic music. This work has been supported in Hungary by the Soros Foundation.The study later investigated narrativity in electroacoustic music, In the form of a paper presented at the 2nd International Symposium on Musical Signification (Helsinki, 1988), published in French, in the No. 51 issue of MUSICWORKS Magazine, and in the Acts of the Symposium published in English, in 1995: ‘Narrativity and electroacoustic music’, in Musical signification, E. Tarasti, ed., Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin and New York.and then incorporated a more complex typology embracing formal, structural approaches in about thirty characteristic works composed since the 1970s. Work on these selected pieces offers a range of investigations into their structure, from the assumption of the oldest structural concepts through to very recent ideas.Plan of a book, some chapters of which were drafted in France, from 1990 onwards, thanks to a grant awarded to CIREM by the Direction de la Musique du Ministère de la Culture, with a view to publishing works on electroacoustic music.

This article considers ideas of image and space as they apply to acousmatic music and to sound art, establishing overlaps and compatibilities which are perhaps overlooked in the current trend to consider these two genres incompatible. Two issues in particular are considered: compositional (especially mimesis and the construction of image, and what shall be termed ‘ephemeral narrative’) and presentational (in particular multichannel speaker deployment). While exploring several relevant works within this discussion, by way of a case study the article introduces the author’s GRIDs project – a series of four multichannel sound sculptures united in their arrangement in geometric arrays of many (in some cases potentially hundreds of) loudspeakers. These permit, by virtue of being so massively (and geometrically) multichannel, the generation of extremely intricate spatial sound environments – fabricated landscapes – that emerge directly from an acousmatic compositional aesthetic. Owing to their alternative means of presentation and presentation contexts, however, they offer very different experiences from those of acousmatic music encountered in the concert hall. So the latter part of this article explores the various ways in which the listener might engage with constructed image space within these sound sculptures, along with the relationship of the audio content of each with its visual and situational setup – that is, its environment.

Artificial Intelligence is a rich and still-developing field with a number of musical applications. This paper surveys the use of Artificial Intelligence in music in the pages of Organised Sound, from the first issue to the latest, at the time of writing. Traditionally, Artificial Intelligence systems for music have been designed with note-based composition in mind, but the research we present here finds that Artificial Intelligence has also had a significant impact in electroacoustic music, with contributions in the fields of sound analysis, real-time sonic interaction and interactive performance-driven composition, to cite but three. Two distinct categories emerged in the Organised Sound papers: on the one hand, philosophically and/or psychologically inspired, symbolic approaches and, on the other hand, biologically inspired approaches, also referred to as Artificial Life approaches. The two approaches are not mutually exclusive in their use, and in some cases are combined to achieve ‘best of both’ solutions. That said, as Organised Sound is uniquely positioned in the electroacoustic music community, it is somewhat surprising that work addressing important compositional issues such as musical form and structure, which Artificial Intelligence can be readily applied to, is not more present in these pages.

Based on a composer's psycho-acoustic imagination or response to music, system dynamics modelling and simulation tools can be used as a scoring device to map the structural dynamic shape of interest of computer music compositions. The tools can also be used as a generator of compositional ideas reflecting thematic juxtaposition and emotional flux in musical narratives. These techniques allow the modelling of everyday narratives to provide a structural/metaphorical means of music composition based on archetypes that are shared with wider audiences. The methods are outlined using two examples.

Contemporary thought is moving away from the notion that the human is a clear-cut concept. In particular, non-anthropocentric views are proliferating within the interdisciplinary area of critical post-humanism, with emphasis on non-dualistic views on relations between human and technology. This article shows how such a view can inform electroacoustic and computer music practice, and sees improvisation linked with composition as a fruitful avenue in this. Following a philosophical preparation and a discussion of relevant music discourse, two computer music works created by the author are discussed to demonstrate a model of music-making that merges composition and improvisation, based on the concepts of cognitive assemblages and intra-action, following the writings of N. Katherine Hayles and Karen Barad, respectively. The works employ techniques related to artificial intelligence and cybernetics, such as machine learning algorithms, agent-based organisation and feedback systems. It is argued that acousmatic sound is an important aspect of this practice. The research is thus situated not only in the frames of improvisation practice and music technology but also within spatial acousmatic composition and performance.

The article describes the design, production and usage of the ‘Rumentarium’, a computer-based sound generating system involving physical objects as sound sources. The Rumentarium is a set of handmade resonators, acoustically excited by DC motors, interfaced to the computer by means of various microcontrollers. Following an ecological/anthropological approach, in the Rumentarium discarded materials are used as sound sources. Every instrument is ‘produced while designed’ in an improvisation-like manner, starting from available materials. In this way, hardware is ‘softened’: that is, it can be continuously modified as in software development. Analogously, the onsite setup is very light, so that components can be added or removed on the fly, even while the Rumentarium is at work. Differently from typical computer music, the Rumentarium, while entirely computationally controlled, is an acoustic sound generator. On one hand, the Rumentarium can be played like an instrument in conjunction with a MIDI controller, for use in live musical performance. On the other side, it can be driven by algorithmic strategies. In this way, the Rumentarium can be configured also as a sound installation, in a standalone mode. Some artistic works are discussed while introducing the various control modalities that have been specifically developed for the Rumentarium.

The project Urban Song Paths took a traditional musical form, the Kaluli song path from Papua, New Guinea, and translated it for a contemporary urban situation. The Two Rivers Project explored a classic song path subject, the route of a waterway, in terms of two London rivers. A sense of place, the journey and the importance of the human voice were transferred from the Kaluli song path tradition into The Two Rivers Project, but other factors were necessary to create a truly urban song path form. Notions of dislocation, true and false memory, the changing functions of place and the unconscious effects of city zones were addressed by this work.

Radio studios including Club d'Essai de la Radiodiffusion–Television Française (Paris), Studio für Elektronische Musik (Cologne), BBC Radiophonic Workshop (London) and others have historically played a key role in the development of international approaches to electroacoustic music. Nevertheless few publications explore the pre-musique-concrète sound-based experimental works of the 1920s and 1930s arising from activities undertaken at radio studios, or the dimensions, properties, implications and impact of the radio medium itself. This article explores the impact of the radio medium on creative practice and argues that radio art is not inherently a subset of sonic art, as it may first appear when nuanced from electroacoustic music practice, but can be viewed as its own art form with idiosyncratic international standpoints and transdisciplinary properties. In addition to a historical discussion, this article offers an insight into the potential for radio art practice to cross-pollinate with music practice and explore new creative territory and hybrid working modalities.

Since Schaeffer’s development of musique concrète, there has been an ongoing debate regarding the value of the acousmatic reduction for engaging with real-world sound in music, and its relevance for composers and listeners. This article presents a way of working with acousmatic sound that is more meaningful to me as a composer, which I have labelled experiential listening. In understanding acousmatic sound through the lens of experientialism (as opposed to Schaeffer’s use of phenomenology), I have devised this method to form a dialogue between sound, composer, and listener through the use of metaphor, to explore concepts beyond the experience of just sound in itself while composing. It accounts for the felt sense of intuition that can form through working with acousmatic sound, presenting a way of using this as a tool for self-understanding. It highlights Brian Kane’s ontology of acousmatic sound as the being of a gap, exploring where this gap can take the mind of the composer and listener. This is illustrated through my use of experiential listening to gain insights into lived experiences of mental illness and trauma, which reveals inner wisdom about the listening self that can be negotiated through acousmatic sound.

This article traces the development of the EMS VCS3 synthesiser from the inception of its precursor, the Don Banks Music Box, through its prototype to its commercial release. The nature of the design team and their technical and aesthetic choices are also discussed. The VCS3 is significant in that it was the first commercial European synthesiser and the team that created it – Tristram Cary, David Cockerell and Peter Zinovieff – were key figures in the development of British electronic music. This detailed study of the genesis of the VCS3 and some of the factors that influenced its design touches on many technical and historiographical strands that may be examined in more depth by future scholars.

This article follows electromechanical technologies through different contexts of electronic and experimental music, sound art and kinetic art as well as through parts of their industrial development and application. The aim is to explore connections between these different fields which are often obscured by disciplinary and genre divides, and which are typically unrepresented by critical and historical accounts. The approach is influenced by the field of science and technology studies (STS, also science technology and society) where technical and cultural entanglements are seen as crafting particular truths, and where the method of following a technology across disciplinary boundaries is found. By taking this approach to identify connections between the areas of electronic music, sound art and kinetic art, new and rediscovered critical appraisals of the use of electromechanical technologies as tools in creative sound production are identified. These positions are then applied to a selection of contemporary practitioners who continue to work with and forefront electromechanical technologies within the fields of electronic music and sound art.

The movement of air is a powerful sound generator. Its presence has been perceived and encoded for over 40,000 years in Australia. It is present in natural and humanly organised environments. This paper traces various wind paths, from natural casuarinas to telegraph wires. Artists such as Peggy West-Moreland, Joan Brassil, Alan Lamb, Jon Rose, Chris Cree Brown, Jodi Rose, the present author and many others have devised their own Aeolian works that interpret, tame or represent the wind for acoustic purposes. Their attitudes to wind-powered sound installations are compared and contrasted against a variety of installation genres, found, permanent, semi-permanent, and ephemeral.

Kaija Saariaho's NoaNoa for flute and electronics consists of two materials: the live flute part and the electronic component, which can be further divided into real-time and pre-recorded material. The sound mixtures of live instrument, pre-recorded material, and real-time electronics create diverse instrumental positions, which also have effects on the musician's experiences of self and gender. This article examines the live flautist's embodied identity during the real-time reverberation and the pre-recorded part. Different performances of NoaNoa by different performers introduce diverse embodied flautist identities where the negotiations of gender and self are constantly redefined.

This article discusses the compositional taxonomy of music theatre works by Constança Capdeville (1937–92) and offers a way to analyse her music and collaborative processes and also the performance of her work through a case study of the piece Double. Capdeville’s works include different elements such as music, settings (staging), movement, text, tape-recorded sound, visual image, props, costumes and lighting. Documentation for the compositions is scattered across different sources or simply lost, making it difficult to reconstruct the works as they have improvised hypothetical components and idiosyncratic or non-standard notations. Using a type of musicological archeology, I want to contribute to the understanding of gesture, language and communication in Capdeville’s works. I aim to preserve the works, particularly by highlighting the collaborative approach of the composer and proposing ways of establishing a documentation process for these aspects in order to systematise the works. I focus on the use of technology of magnetic tape as both a source of listening (the tapes provide a recording of the entire performance) and an instrument (tape recordings are given parts in the composition of the piece). Technology is also an important analytical tool because it helps to track collaborative creative processes. The iAnalyse software is used to help reconstruct and interpret music theatre works.

Although the hybridisation of Western and Chinese musics has been progressing for over a century, many early attempts tended to treat Chinese material in a rather superficial manner. This resulted in mere ‘Orientalist’ Western pieces and rather bland pentatonic/romantic ‘Chinese’ music that simply harmonised the basic outline of popular Chinese melodies with Western chord progressions. The use of recent technologies has greatly accelerated the pace and depth of this hybridisation and solved many of its artistic problems. Technological advances now make it possible and practical to incorporate the subtle but essential elements of traditional Chinese music, and of course other world musics, in works that seem satisfying for Western and non-Western audiences. This paper presents a brief historical overview of the hybridisation of Western and Chinese musical traditions, examines common pitfalls of many early attempts, and reviews how these issues are addressed compositionally and technically in the author's recent electroacoustic pieces, Li Jiang Etudes No. 1, 2 & 3.

Using a mixture of physiological evidence and analogies of time, the author describes the current version of a model of how we might view our interactions with time in music and beyond. An older model designed for analysis of complex twentieth-century acoustic works is updated to incorporate varied profiles of electroacoustic music. Recent research in auditory systems corroborates that we receive different types of information simultaneously through different channels, each taking more or less periodic sampling from different bands of frequencies – from timbre to phrase length and beyond. In order to acknowledge both the primitive structures of our complex hearing mechanisms and the different profiles of listeners, it is suggested that this multiple-sampling strategy may operate in a parallel way at a much larger scale, thereby allowing us to integrate the listener’s preference for pacing, contrast and densities of activity into the sensory processing of a musical work. The article is enriched by insights from soundscape pioneer Hildegard Westerkamp relating to various aspects of the discussion, from sensory overload to ecological concerns to the natural rallentando of a soundwalk. Finally, a whimsical elaboration based on the analogy of time as a river is presented in order to incorporate a more organic set of characteristics into our appreciation of music and time.

This article is based on my creative practice as an electroacoustic1 composer who has developed a practice of audiovisual composition broadly sited within the field of visual music.

A brief contextual survey sites my work by first presenting a personal definition of visual music and of a set of conceptual approaches to work in this field. My practice is framed as an attempt to apply ideas and principles taken from musique concrète in an audiovisual domain. I discuss in particular the idea of reduced listening and propose a visual equivalent, visual suspension.

I discuss the problems around reduced listening when applied to concrète ‘real-world’ sounds, and propose that two audio archetypes, silence (or tending-to-silence) and noise (or tending-to-noise), exhibit unique physical and phenomenological properties which sidestep these issues. Observing a similar set of problems around visual suspension, I propose visual counterparts to silence and noise – by relating both to the idea of self-similarity, both temporal and spatial – which exhibit similar properties. In my own work I have found these audiovisual territories to be especially fertile, and to open up avenues for new kinds of sound–image relationships with great creative potential.

This paper documents elements of a research project undertaken between 2008 and 2012. Building upon the Intention/Reception project of Leigh Landy (2006) and Rob Weale (2005), the project sought to investigate audience interpretations for works of electroacoustic audiovisual music and to utilise an expanded understanding of the audience – as active participants in interpretation – to subsequently inform the composition of new works. This project combined three distinct research methodologies: empirical data collection, scholarly research and composition. The composed works were both informed by the results of empirical data collection and scholarly research, and adapted (re-composed) throughout the latter stages of the research in order to explore emergent research findings and research hypotheses.

Interpretations were demonstrated to be contingent upon the individual lived experience of an audience member, with aspects of the work's discourse acting to narrow the interpretative potential of the work. The use of mimetic materials (sonic or visual) within works of electroacoustic audiovisual music were demonstrated to be potentially obstructing to an aesthetic interpretation of the work. And the importance of recognising the distinction between physical signal and perceived object was highlighted within the process of composition and the subsequent testing.

The Museum of Music in Paris possesses a collection of 280 instruments from the twentieth century. Most of them belong to the general families of electric and electronic musical instruments, which we will call ‘electrophones’, in deference to the name chosen by Curt Sachs (1940). The instruments are gathered in families so that the whole collection illustrates the milestones of the twentieth century; for instance, the museum has a large set of diverse Ondes Martenot. However, due to its scarcity, the Trautonium is represented by one of Oscar Sala's Mixtur-Trautonia.

Like any museum, we have to encourage the conservation of this heritage. To maintain a large collection of electrophones like the one we have, a specific knowledge base has to be developed. We have been working on this aspect of the project for the past two years. From the onset, it was decided to start the collection with the Ondes Martenot. Our aim was to define a model approach that could also be applied to other electric and electronic instruments. This work involves organising the instruments, studying them in order to outline conditions of appropriate conservation, and determining which kind(s) of restoration should be undertaken.

A first step has been to gather all information necessary to understanding the instrument and its mode of performance. With this goal in mind, we have taken a complete inventory of our collection with the aim of coming up with a first assessment of the state of the instruments and determining whether to allow performers to play them. Thanks to this work, we were able to start taking precautionary measures against degradation; we are now also able to answer many questions relevant to the restoration and conservation of this collection.

Art always does more than subsist upon technical progress; for centuries its practice has merged with it, and we should never forget that the first meaning of the word art was technê. However, never before has the relationship between art and technology raised so many questions and provoked so much misunderstanding. As a matter of fact, at the same time as the frontiers of technique continue to recede, the frontiers of art seem more and more difficult to grasp. (Couchot and Hillaire 2003: 15)