Knut Wiggen (1927–2016) is not a household name in music technology, despite the fact that he developed cutting-edge technology during the 1960s and early 1970s in Stockholm, as leader of both the concert organisation Fylkingen and the Electronic Music Studio (EMS). In the international literature on computer music, this development has only been mentioned in passing, if at all. However, EMS and the general development has been discussed in Scandinavian texts,1 but the links between Knut Wiggen’s technical achievements and his far-reaching ambitions for the music of the future, and how this vision aligned with philosophy and research at the time, have not been the focus. Hartenstein (2011) provides insights into Wiggen’s personal intentions and philosophy, and does not go much into technical detail, Groth (2010) focuses principally on the politics and aesthetic differences and subsequent conflicts at EMS, and although an overview of the EMS technology is provided, it is not always made clear how innovative it was. In Broman (2007), the broader lines of electroacoustic musical development are in focus.

Wiggen combined social and political concerns with technical insight, and his overarching conviction of how a new art was necessary as a counterweight to mute consumerism is unique in computer music. The aim of this article is to describe and explain the coherency of Wiggen’s achievements, his philosophy, his use of current technological advances and research and his development of a new method for composing the music of the future. In order to support this focus, mainly primary sources have been used,2 however, the literature mentioned above has been consulted due to its use of interview data and other personal communication not commonly available. A degree of duplication of information has been required for the narrative not to suffer.

The article will show that Wiggen was a visionary pioneer who has a natural place among such computer music luminaries as Max Mathews, Jean-Claude Risset, John Chowning, Iannis Xenakis, Peter Zinovieff and others from the same generation.

This paper describes a large, interactive sound installation that was presented in Oslo during October 2002. The installation, in broad terms, brought the presence of the whole country into the one location through sound, and made the sound available for the public as material to play with or explore in a more structured fashion. The sonic results were streamed to the Internet, together with images from the exterior of the installation. The installation was located at the central train station in an area where thousands of people pass through every day. The curatorial idea was developed by two institutions, as an answer to their missions of providing interesting sonic material and events for the whole country. The idea was given concrete form by three composers, and brought up on a national level through co-arrangement with a large festival of contemporary music. Funding for the installation was provided by both private and public organisations. The installation serves as an example on how a large and complex work of art can be developed through institutional curatorial effort, artistic intentions and activity, and commercial interests. The installation maintained a high degree of artistic integrity while being accessible and attractive for large audiences.

This article describes the design and implementation of MidiVisualiser, a virtual environment which provides an interactive visualisation of MIDI music data. Section 1 explores music visualisation in general and examines the role of computers and virtual environments. Section 2 briefly surveys existing music visualisation research and places MidiVisualiser in context. Section 3 examines various techniques of visualisation and discusses composite dimensions and ‘Benediktine cyberspace’, including a description of how visualisation techniques derived from them were used in MidiVisualiser to overcome some of the difficulties associated with representing large numbers of data attributes simultaneously. Sections 4 and 5 contain an overview of the implementation and evaluation of MidiVisualiser, while section 6 discusses future work and conclusions.

This paper describes the ideas and methods that led to the writing of an algorithmic composition NTrope Suite. This piece, for solo recorders and voice, was generated by ‘mixing’ works by different composers from different eras. The idea behind the work was to examine random generation procedures that could maintain stylistic properties typical to the reference works. The interesting property of this method is that it implements a sort of ‘statistical learning’, that optimally preserves the properties of the reference pieces and also properly ‘generalises’ them so as to create a new valid work. The musical result is very coherent, maintaining both stylistic resemblance to the reference music and exhibiting some surprising originality as well. Theoretically, the resulting piece is closest to the reference works in terms of mutual entropy. The algorithm and its theoretical significance are discussed in the paper.

This paper examines the integration of traditional New Zealand Mäori instruments with digital music technology, and the use of these instruments in making new works. The focus is on the work of performer/composers Hirini Melbourne and Richard Nunns, as well as recent collaborations that Richard Nunns has undertaken with some composers and musicians in genres other than Mäori music. Aesthetic, practical and cultural considerations in the composition process are explored.

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.

This paper introduces the ElectroAcoustic Resource Site project (EARS), taking a tripartite approach: first outlining the project's philosophy, then reporting on work-to-date and finishing with a discussion of the project's ambitions and aims.

The project's aim is the development of a dynamic, multi-lingual, international, publicly available Internet-based bibliographical resource designed to enhance the scholarly infrastructure of electroacoustic music studies, in particular, the musicology of electroacoustic music. Through the use of hypertext structures and linking systems the site will help to contextualise specific research within the broad field of electroacoustic music studies, as well as making helpful links between related areas/items of scholarship. The project aspires to assist access to current, past and evolving areas of scholarship and will attempt to redress certain imbalances in the ease of access to areas of research within the field. The project will strive to conceive of electroacoustic music in its widest possible sense, acknowledge the interdisciplinary nature of the field, and aspire to the greatest possible breadth and inclusiveness. The EARS project is coordinated by an international consortium, is directed by the authors and can be found at http://www.mti.dmu.ac.uk/EARS

The importance that Chinese composers attach to their nation’s cultural traditions in their electronic music compositions has become a dominant trend in Chinese electronic music. This has generally led to a ‘Chinese imagery’ in Chinese electronic music compositions. Among China-inspired electroacoustic music, the interactive multimedia work A Reflection in the Brook (小青, 2013) shows a unique expression. The author explores how the composer recreated a controversial female figure in Chinese history through a completely real-time audiovisual language: Feng Xiaoqing, thereby presenting Chinese imagery in electroacoustic music through an alternative approach. The audiovisual relationship in A Reflection in the Brook will be analysed through the lens of Michel Chion’s audiovisual theory and the perspective of musical composition techniques, further presenting the audiovisual aesthetics of multimedia electronic music.

over the past century, an art form has emerged between the realms of visual art and music. created by composers and sculptors, ‘sound art’ challenges fundamental divisions between these two sister arts and may be found in museums, festivals or public sites. works of sound art play on the fringes of our often-unconscious aural experience of a world dominated by the visual. this work addresses our ears in surprising ways: it is not strictly music, or noise, or speech, or any sound found in nature, but often includes, combines and transforms elements of all of these. sound art sculpts sound in space and time, reacts to environments and reshapes them, and frames ambient ‘found sound’, altering our concepts of space, time, music and noise.

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.

This short article presents the author’s ideas about different score formats for instrumental performers of mixed electroacoustic music. Following a trajectory from initial understanding through effective rehearsal and ending in performance, different score formats are discussed. Each is based on and addresses performers’ needs and improves documentation and transmission of the composer’s intentions and the performer’s contribution. The author bases these suggestions on her experience as a performer/commissioner and composer of new mixed electroacoustic works, many of which are collaborative creations.

This article provides four viewpoints on the narratives of space, allowing us to think about possible relations between sites and sounds and reflecting on how places might tell stories, or how practitioners embed themselves in a place in order to shape cultural, social and/or political narratives through the use of sound. I propose four viewpoints that investigate the relationship between sites and sounds, where narratives are shaped and made through the exploration of specific sonic activities. These are: sonic narrative of space, sonic activism, sonic preservation and sonic participatory action.

I examine each of these ideas, initially focusing in more detail on the first viewpoint, which provides the context for discussing and analysing a recent site-specific music improvisation project entitled ‘Museum City’, a work that aligns most closely with my proposal for a ‘sonic narrative of space’, while also bearing aspects of each of the other proposed viewpoints.

The work ‘Museum City’ by Pedro Rebelo, Franziska Schroeder, Ricardo Jacinto and André Cepeda specifically enables me to reflect on how derelict and/or transitional spaces might be re-examined through the use of sound, particularly by means of live music improvisation. The spaces examined as part of ‘Museum City’ constitute either deserted sites or sites about to undergo changes in their architectural layout, their use and sonic make-up. The practice in ‘Museum City’ was born out of a performative engagement with(in) those sites, but specifically out of an intimate listening relationship by three improvisers situated within those spaces.

The theoretical grounding for this article is situated within a wider context of practising and cognising musical spatiality, as proposed by Georgina Born (2013), particularly her proposition for three distinct lineages that provide an understanding of space in/and music. Born’s third lineage, which links more closely with practices of sound art and challenges a Euclidean orientation of pitch and timbre space, makes way for a heightened consideration of listening and ‘the place’ of sound. This lineage is particularly crucial for my discussion, since it positions music in relation to social experiences and the everyday, which the work ‘Museum City’ endeavoured to embrace.

Sonic narratives on fixed media can take many forms. We may find complexly nuanced sound productions that rely on a broad range of implied and/or culturally shared non-verbal cues to convey a narrative progression. But we also frequently find creative productions centred upon the human voice, much like traditional storytelling but presented in the wider variety of performed, captured, or constructed contexts enabled by technology. In those productions, human voice without a visible physical source will represent, if only in the historic sense, the essence of the acousmatic – an unseen speaker addressing assembled listeners. And, although precise listener responses to that unseen voice will certainly vary, we typically respond quite strongly when directly addressed by another human voice. What are some of the attributes of voice that can trigger those strong responses? And, more pragmatically, what questions should composers consider as we attempt to harness that power for our own creative ends? In this article, we raise some of those questions for consideration, with the hope that readers – particularly those who are also sonic creators – will seek to answer them through their own creative practice.

This article presents a multimodal exploratory study aimed at searching for evidence that can guide us in the adoption and/or improvement of appropriate theoretical–methodological approaches for studying the role of the spatiality/spatialisation of sound and the cognitive/affective empathic processes involved in the acousmatic experience. For this purpose, controlled listening sessions were conducted in which fragments of different loudspeaker music were presented. The subjects reported their emotional experience and the degree of familiarity they assigned to each sound fragment. Specific questions for the acousmatic fragments inquire into the potential relationships between the sound stimulus and the emotion declared by the subjects. From these experiences, qualitative reports were obtained through a semi-structured interview, and electrodermal activity (EDA) logs were recorded in parallel for an intended group. Based on these results, it is argued that spatiality might be linked to a complex cognitive–affective response from the listeners and emerges as a distinctive element of the meaning that the listeners ascribe to their acousmatic musical experience.

Within the context of discussing contemporary music the European tendency to overvalue abstraction is questioned. The use of environmental sounds in electroacoustic music is highlighted as an example of the questionable value of abstraction. Attention is then focused on a recent Truax composition, Powers of Two (1995) as a work of electroacoustic music theatre. The historical musical and poetic references, as well as the sound sources adopted for the work, are discussed, and placed within the human framework of relationship embodied in the piece. A concluding section summarises the work as an attempt to create a contemporary myth from historical sources, and as a dramatic expression employing electroacoustic forces.

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 analysis explores how Barry Truax’s Song of Songs (1992) for oboe d’amore, English horn and two digital soundtracks reorients prevailing norms of sexuality by playing with musical associations and aural conventions of how gender sounds. The work sets the erotic dialogue between King Solomon and Shulamite from the biblical Song of Solomon text. On the soundtracks we hear a Christian monk’s song, environmental sounds (birds, cicadas and bells), and two speakers who recite the biblical text in its entirety preserving the gendered pronouns of the original. By attending to established gender norms, Truax confirms the identity of each speaker, such that the speakers seemingly address one another as a duet, but the woman also addresses a female lover and the man a male. These gender categories are then progressively blurred with granular time-stretching and harmonisation (which transform the timbre of the voices), techniques that, together, resituate the presumed heteronormative text within a diverse constellation of possible sexual orientations.

Trip hop music emerged in the early 1990s, however, as a label the term ‘trip hop’ has always been problematic. Portishead, Massive Attack and Tricky, the artists frequently credited with creating trip hop, have unanimously rejected the label, claiming their music has nothing to do with trip hop. Despite the artists’ objections, music industrialists, fans and academics continually label their music trip hop or its alternate term ‘Bristol sound’, though specifics are never given as to what, if anything, distinguishes the two terms. This article seeks to mediate the discussion between opposing viewpoints by describing the Bristol sound as a style that relates to the trip hop genre. Following the introduction, the second section discusses the controversy surrounding the term ‘trip hop’ and suggests possible reasons behind the artists’ rejection of the label. The third section addresses the terms ‘genre’ and ‘style’ and outlines their similar points of reference while also highlighting their different areas of inquiry. The final section analyses several trip hop songs and identifies common elements that relate to the trip hop genre, before identifying explicit differences that distinguish the Bristol sound style. The analysis of style focuses on the spectral quality of the works and draws from Smalley’s (1997) theory of spectromorphology.

For over twenty years, Swedish artist Carl Michael von Hausswolff (born 1956 in Linköping) has been giving shape to a range of works which push the boundaries of sound experimentation and reach out into installation art, photography, video, performance and curating projects. Stemming from his experiments with tape and investigations into EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomena) throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and setting up a number of ongoing collaborations with artist Leif Elggren and with a wide range of experimental musicians in the collective, site-specific sound installation freq_out, von Hausswolff's work spans the undefined territory between sound and the visual arts – he has done so, also by organising exhibitions such as the 2nd Göteborg Biennial in 2003. His audio production, using devices such as oscillators, tone generators, microphones attached to electricity circuits, is inextricably linked to his visual and conceptual research, always addressing issues of borders, interior/exterior, liminal states and hidden fluxes of energies. At the forefront of international experimentation, his work has been featured in some of the most important exhibitions and museums in the world, and his audio pieces have been published by the most remarkable avant-garde labels.