As a composer in the very late twentieth century my goal is to inject as much intelligence and substance into the process of music-making as possible, to present listeners with sensory and intellectual metaphorical tools that enable them to perceive relationships of time and space in ways that might otherwise go unnoticed. Music-oriented researchers in the fields of psychoacoustics and cognition in recent years have viewed the computer as a means of simply extending and rationalising traditional music theory and form, rather than summarising the base of musical knowledge we have inherited and then breaking free of those constraints. Performers, composers and producers in the field of popular entertainment continue to use technology to narrow rather than broaden aesthetic boundaries in the so-called creative arts.

A new aesthetic paradigm is needed . . .

Technology provides us with the tools we require in order to build a genuinely new method of music creation and listening. I propose that it is time to invest our energies in the creation of visionary learning tools that enhance our ability to evolve in our relationship to ourselves, to one another, to the planet, and perhaps ultimately to the stars. It is the author’s strongest desire to allow for the full realisation of what computer music has long held the promise to provide – limitless variation with infinite control.

Toward this end, I document here (i) a theory of music that attempts to assimilate the infinite and subtle interconnectedness of the human experience into a single symbolic structure, and (ii) the application of this theory to the extension of an emerging genre – the environmentally interactive computer music system – designed for eventual use by people not necessarily aware of the underlying technical and aesthetic principles at work, but fully appreciative of the profound personal benefits to be found embedded therein.

Owing to space limitations, I will focus almost exclusively on the theoretical and aesthetic issues that have driven the software development, and leave a detailed discussion of the system specifications and its operation to a separate article.

This article arises from the need to reflect upon the possibility of developing new ways of teaching electroacoustic music, based on the opportunities recently offered by technology and the theories about learning that have been developed in recent decades. After taking into consideration the limits of the current teaching methods, the article examines various theories and approaches that involve questioning the objectivity of the learning process, the concept of multiple intelligences, the concentration on the experience as the focal point of learning and so forth. On the basis of these reflections, and after evaluating various teaching experiences over the past twenty years, the authors make some practical proposals, without imagining a curriculum, but rather by outlining several possible activities within an organic teaching project. To this end, a software program is described and realised in which the learner is engaged through the use of an interactive game format that can be played by the individual or in a group, and that encourages the development of the capacities of analysis, perception, practical skill, knowledge, imagination and creativity.

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 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.

Over the past five years, a digital community of CD-ROM artists has begun to emerge. The one element that serves as the common thread to this particular community is that these artists and their works are based on a new musical presentation, one fully tied to a visual element, an interactive, exploratory world that is tailored to the individual user's progress through a finite number of elements. In short, although intermedia works have a long history, now the user may explore at his/her own pace. This unique manner of presentation has emerged into the worlds of art music, underground music, and performance art.

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 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 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.

There are a number of electroacoustic (EA) composers who draw on spiritual or religious material for their work. However, for some the word ‘spiritual’ is problematic, being too vague or broad, and the word ‘religious’ too narrow. To refine the word ‘spiritual’ therefore, in a way that might be acceptable also to those who are religious, I employ the contemporary concept of spiritual intelligence (SI) as a proposed framework for linking a discourse of spirituality with electroacoustic music. In addition to postulating SI as a way of framing the word ‘spirituality’, I identify three different ways in which EA composers draw on spiritual or religious material: some use existing sacred texts or methods; some approach sound itself to explore the nature of reality; finally, there are those who are drawn to ancient ways of understanding where spirit and material worlds are not separated; for example, in the West, the Pythagorean tradition.

Schizophonic soundscapes in Murray Schafer's critical acoustic ecology mean a split between listening and seeing, between space and place, between audience and communicator. His idea of a gap between senses is based on electronic media like radio and telephone, but it gains new actuality in modern (multimedia) times. The new technology and its users have too experimented with the creative inversion of schizophony in sound and vision. Film sound design and film music combine sound in and out of context, composition works with contrapunctual audiovisions; video art and sound art, as in the work of Robert Cahen, combine and mix genres of all kinds and senses. MetaSon #5 Skruv Stockholm is an audiovisual soundwalk, based on soundscape recordings in Sweden in the 1970s and 1990s, combined with associative pictures and designs, each in its own rhythms and times. It consists less of the common meaning both share, being more dependent on the fluidity and dynamic of the relationship between the elements. Sound and image create an intermedium, intermodal space neither of which could project alone. From moment to moment, schizophonic montage and idea invert into a fresh, maybe evocative look at the way we perceive, where the audio flow transforms stable pictures into liquid forms, where image follows sound and is treated like sound.

From the early experimentation with specific sounds in musique concrète (Palombini 1999) to the ‘anecdotal’ music of Luc Ferrari (1996) and the ecological sound activism of Hildegard Westerkamp (2002), the collecting, composition and recomposition of sonorous objects has been central to sound practice. Some sound art has privileged a relationship with visual arts and the structuring of objects in curated spaces (Licht 2007), others with the sound worlds beyond the exhibition (Schafer 1994). By examining a specific sound art installation, Sound and Seclusion by Tim Shaw, this article reworks the idea of sonorous objects as artefacts displaying different kinds of representations, knowledges or data. This question of sonorous ‘knowledge-objects’ is particularly important as ‘collected sounds’ become incorporated into compositions away from their, often remote, spatio-temporal origin out there in the landscape. This article raises three areas for discussion. First, what can sonorous objects tell us about the pre-compositional world (Impett 2007)? Second, in what ways can we understand sonorous objects as they are reworked in compositions which re-narrate them? Third, how can we understand sonorous objects as traces and pieces of data as well as aesthetic productions? The article concludes with a case for reworking the very idea of a sonorous object in sound practices as a product of dead logics and dead worlds as it emerges in new ensembles of composition away from its origin.

Urban Portrait: Thessaloniki is a sonic art installation by this author, presented at the Lansdown Centre for Electronic Arts of Middlesex University, London, in May 2008. This article constitutes an exploration of sonic representation of the experience of place as a central element of the work. The term psychosonography is introduced to encapsulate the described method and references to its supporting concepts. Urban Portrait is about representation of experienced locality, as well as the emergence of relationships among a collection of such localities through their sonic embodiments. Ultimately, it takes the form of the sonic equivalent of a psychogeographical map, to be navigated by aural means.

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.

Live coding is a celebrated practice that is used in many areas, combined with a variety of artistic fields. Code poetry is a form of poetry with many variations, all of which have a common rule: the code that is or produces the poem must compile without errors. The meeting point of live coding and code poetry seems to have not yet been thoroughly explored, leaving space for experimentation and research. Certain attempts have already been made, where live coding is either approached through natural language or used to break up and merge chunks of existing poems, forming new ones. Computer code has also been used to write deterministic opera librettos, following the code poetry paradigm. This article focuses on the literary and artistic attributes of code, on code poetry and on the existing attempts to combine it with live coding. It also highlights the narrative attribute of musical live coding to formulate a rationale for combining live coding with code poetry in a musical context. The goal is to examine the possibilities of this combination, as well as how this can be achieved, from a technical point of view.

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 in memoriam tribute for Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer focuses on his seminal work in establishing soundscape studies and the World Soundscape Project. It discusses his intellectual legacy in terms of emphasising a perceptually based approach and the importance of soundscape design, along with critical responses to his ideas.

KYKLOS, an algorithmic composition program, is presented here. It generalises musical scales for use in composition as well as in performance. The sonic output of the system is referred to as polymodal music since it consists of four independent voices playing ‘synthetic modes’. KYKLOS is suitable for computer-assisted composition because it generates MIDI files which can be altered later by the composer. It can equally well be used in live performance for dynamic modification of parameters enabling realtime musical control.

An interview is a strange format for a research review; however, it is sometimes a quick and effective way to present a problematic. In this case, Christian Zanési interviewed by Évelyne Gayou gives a perspective of the future activities of the GRM from an institutional perspective as well as in relation with the new electronic tendencies, thus answering the major question of the social function of a research and production institution today.

Much electroacoustic music composition and sound art, and the commentary that surrounds them, is locked into a materialist sound-object mindset in which the hierarchical organisation of sonic events, especially those developed through abstraction, are considered antithetical to sounds ‘being themselves’. This article argues that musical sounds are not just material objects, and that musical notations, on paper or in computer code, are not just symbolic abstractions, but instructions for embodied actions. When notation is employed computationally to control resonance and gestural actuators at multiple acoustic, psychoacoustic and conceptual levels of music form, vibrant sonic morphologies may emerge from the quantum-like boundaries between them. In order to achieve that result, it is necessary to replace our primary focus of compositional attention from the Digital Audio Workstation sound transformation tools currently in vogue, with those that support algorithmic thinking at all levels of compositional design.