In this article the authors present an overview of the current situation in Ukraine, with regards to the question of analytical terminology applied to new methods of creation in electronic music composition. The article establishes the differences and the similarities between the analyses of instrumental and electronic music structures, while considering the role of technology in the creation of new electronic music works. This paper also establishes a link between the origin of current analytical processes and electronic music practice in Ukraine, taking into account the function of a given terminology and its characteristic elements relating to a local geographical and cultural context. The authors underline the importance of integrating new music forms in academic circles and discuss external influences in the development of new musical systems. This is demonstrated by exposing selected musical materials, which can be considered representative of the creative and theoretical processes found in the field of electronic music in Ukraine.

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.

In three previous issues of OS (10/1, 2005, 13/3, 2008 and 19/2, 2014) a range of scholars explored non-Western instrumentation in electroacoustic music. These issues addressed concerns about sensitive cultural issues within electroacoustic music. This article builds upon this discussion through an examination of a number of electroacoustic composer-performers using non-Western instrumentation. This discussion will include the voices of ‘Western’ electroacoustic composers using non-Western instruments or sounds sources. It will also document some of the work of non-Western electroacoustic composers who incorporate traditional material or indigenous instruments in their music. Special attention will be given to the complexity of being in-between musical cultures through a critical engagement with theories relating to hybridity, orientalism and self-identity. In particular, this article will focus on my own practice of composing and performing electroacoustic music with the North Indian lute known as the sarode. It will discuss both cultural and artistic concerns about using the sarode outside the framework of Indian classical music and question whether Indian classical music can ever be ‘appropriately appropriated’ in an electroacoustic context. Two of my recent compositions will be explored and I will outline the development of my practice leading to the creation of a new ‘hybrid’ instrument especially for playing electroacoustic music.

There has been an extraordinary amount of interest in sound spatialisation in recent years. The volume of work in this area has pushed many international organisations to feature sound spatialisation as a theme for conferences and publications, and Organised Sound is probably overdue in having a thematic issue based upon aspects of sound in space. This issue of Organised Sound contains many different views of space. We have included articles about spatialisation techniques, our understanding of sound spatialisation, composition, performance and spaces inside music as well as the spaces and environments where music can exist, including virtual spaces.

This article discusses the use of an accessible visual notation system that represents the melodic component of an electronic music composition in acid house music, based on programming the Roland TB-303 bassline synthesiser’s sequencer. This notation system can be used for sharing, composition, collaboration and archival purposes. This system is called an acid pattern. The article analyses a variety of different approaches to communicate acid patterns. It examines the requirements and visual elements used and how they relate directly to the functionality of the Roland TB-303’s sequencer. Through content analysis of images, text and audio data gathered from various music community websites this article furthers the understanding of how the practices and cultures of acid house music composition, notation and archiving are shared online and how they, enabled by web-based technologies, can build communities. This article suggests important possibilities for communities of practice-based around a shared cultural identity, accessible notation systems, and the creation and recreation of music in both online and offline contexts.

The medium and genre of the mixtape, a form dependent upon borrowed, repurposed and re-contextualised sonic material, has recently re-emerged as a vital component of contemporary commercial and creative music culture. This article suggests that analysis of the mixtape’s history and ethos can provide useful insight into ongoing tensions between cultures of active and passive listening, questions of ownership with regard to recorded sound and between the roles of producer and consumer within contemporary audio culture. It also proposes, via reference to relevant contemporary works, that the mixtape may now be considered a vital hybrid creative form, part composition/part compilation, with which composers, producers and sonic artists may actively engage. It historically and culturally contextualises this form, placing it within a lineage of military, political, creative and commercial conflict, which, among recorded sound technologies, is unique to tape and shows that the mixtape may be seen as an expression or utilisation of these factors. Consistent commercial and industrial efforts to suppress tape’s subversive qualities are outlined as are creative methodologies which have been adopted to resist such efforts. Contemporary music industry strategies to channel and commodify the aura and ethos of the mixtape as forerunner of the curated playlists vital to its current business model are detailed and contemporary cassette culture is considered as an alternative inheritor of the mixtape’s legacy and as alternative model for future musical creation and distribution. Finally, a set of characteristics which distinguish the mixtape as a creative form are identified and their potential application and implications are discussed.

This article attempts to place the dynamic of popular electronic music, evident since the late 1970s and extending to the current situation, at the forefront of developing both a strategy of critique and a medium for critical reflection. The genres covered include electronic music in and around the time of punk rock, subsequent moves to the forcing ground of pop music with the era of synth-pop, the dynamic upheavals created through the surging form of techno, up to the prevalent genres of micro-sound and electronica. The essence of both the body of critique formulated by the music, and the critical reflection of such critique (as developed in works when a genre of music is said to have ‘passed’) is not pinned to a rigid model of assessment. Instead, the strength of popular music's ability to strategise and conduct a critique is considered in the self-same music's ability to subvert the definition and ‘metric spaces’ of critique as accumulated through previous genres.

This article describes the potential of apps as a platform for composers of electroacoustic music to present their work. It traces a history of changing concepts of structure in music from objects and symmetrical forms to dynamic systems that provide a basis for interactive instruments. Early examples of interactive instruments are presented and discussed. The opening up of music to all sounds is discussed in the context of the origins and growth of global communities within the music world. The structure of an app format for electroacoustic compositions is described and examples of various music apps are discussed from the perspective of the electroacoustic app format.

This article explores the relationship of desire and distance in Kaija Saariaho's Lonh (1996) for soprano and electronics. The subject matter of Lonh is desire and romantic pleasures, anchored to feminine subjectivity, represented on stage by a soprano singer. Electronics provide the environmental sounds and amplify the singer's voice. Through Lonh looms a medieval song in the Occitan language, ‘Lanquan li jorn son lonc en mai’ by Jaufré Rudel, a famous troubadour in twelfth-century Provence. Saariaho reverses the narrative convention of love stories by presenting the most intimate encounter at the very beginning. In their succeeding encounters, the lovers move further away from each other. Similarly, in the course of Lonh the distance to Jaufré's song also increases. Luce Irigaray's concepts of love are used for an analysis of the relationship of the loving pair. By the end of Lonh the borderlines of speaking, singing, electronics, language and music collapse in Barthesian jouissance (bliss). The electronic technology in Lonh enables the re-investiture of cultural values, and the construction of flexible identities, crossing boundaries between the self and the other.

In the early days of music technologies the collaboration between musicians, scientists, technicians and equipment producers was very close. How did this collaboration develop? Why did scientific, business, and musical agendas converge towards a common goal? Was there a mutual exchange of skills and expertise? To answer these questions this article will consider a case study in early computer music. It will examine the career of the Italian cellist and composer Pietro Grossi (1917–2002), who explored computer music with the support of mainframe manufacturers, industrial R&D, and scientific institutions. During the 1970s, Grossi became an eager programmer and achieved a first-hand experience of computer music, writing several software packages. Grossi was interested in avant-garde music as an opportunity to make ‘music without musicians’. He aimed at a music composed and performed by machines, and eventually, he achieved this result with his music software. However, to accomplish it, Grossi could not be a lonely pioneer; he had to become a member, albeit an atypical one, of the Italian computing community of the time. Grossi’s story, thus, can tell us much about the collaborative efforts stimulated by the use of early computer technologies in sound research, and how these efforts developed at the intersection of science, art and industry.

Claude Shannon’s 1948 paper ‘A Mathematical Theory of Communication’ provided the essential foundation for the digital/information revolution that enables these very pixels to glow in meaningful patterns and permeates nearly every aspect of modern life. Information Theory, born fully grown from this paper, has been applied and mis-applied to a multitude of disciplines in the last 70-odd years, from quantum physics to psychology. Shannon himself famously decried those jumping on the ‘scientific bandwagon’ of Information Theory without sufficient mathematical rigour. Nevertheless, having a brief personal connection to Dr Shannon (and being extremely grateful for it), I will take the liberty of colouring some of my experience with computer network music with less-than-rigorous insights gained from his work.

Electroacoustic music and its historical antecedents open up new ways of thinking about musical time. Whereas music performed by humans is necessarily constrained by certain temporal limits that define human information processing and embodiment, machines are capable of producing sound with scales and structures of time that reach potentially very far outside of these human limitations. But even musics produced with superhuman means are still subject to human constraints in music perception and cognition. Focusing on five principles of auditory perception – segmentation, grouping, pulse, metre and repetition – we hypothesise that musics that exceed or subvert the thresholds that define ‘human time’ are likely to be recognised by listeners as expressing timelessness. To support this hypothesis, we report an experiment in which a listening panel reviewed excerpts of electroacoustic music selected for their temporally subversive or excessive properties, and rated them (1) for the pace of time they express (normative, speeding up, or slowing down), and (2) for whether or not the music expresses ‘timelessness’. We find that while the specific musical parameters associated with temporal phenomenology vary from one musical context to the next, a general trend obtains across musical contexts through the excess or subversion of a particular perceptual constraint by a given musical parameter on the one hand, and the subjective experiences of time and timelessness on the other.

In this article, we offer an object-oriented ontological perspective to complement the diversity of sounding ontologies, challenging the human perspective as the only valid perspective and call for the necessity of including perspectives of objects such as a speakers, voices and light sensors. Subscribing to this view also confronts music and sound art as consistent autonomous categories and focuses on how the pieces attune to the environment, emphasising meetings, transformations and translations through and with other objects. These meetings generate an ecological awareness of causal aesthetics where objects time and space each other. This contrasts with traditional analysis of music and sound art, which is based on the assumption that time and space are containers in which sound and music unfold. We analyse two contemporary pieces by the authors in an attempt to unfold a dark ecological1 approach to test the implications, limits and potentials for future use and development.

This article discusses the importance of active listening when engaging new audiences with experimental and unfamiliar musical formats. Spatial music is examined as a physically immersive medium in which the audience is implicated as an active component in the execution of its performance. A brief account of the historic context of spatial music will be presented alongside speculation for the trajectory of its future; particularly its potential as a model for audience engagement. This article will first consider how spatially immersive performances have the capacity to activate listeners and how can this help to engage new audiences with new ways of listening. It will also question the notion of inhabiting spatial music, with an investigation of the multiple ways in which spatial music relates to physical space and the terms of its inhabitation. The concept of virtual listening will be discussed in response to trends towards passive hearing, as driven by recent technological developments in acoustic software and hardware, and the resultant abstraction of the spatial and social dynamics of sound in virtual space. The physiological and psychological differences between listening and hearing will also be examined as a means of establishing fundamental differences in the ways that we interact with music, and questioning what our listening habits tell us about audience engagement in the context of experimental music performance. This article will also question the individual roles of the musician, composer, architect/designer and audience in the ongoing responsibility to improve audience engagement in new, or unfamiliar musical works. Importantly, this article will also explicitly examine who we are referring to when we use the term ‘new audiences’. Major developments in acoustic technology during the last few decades have somewhat confused the diagram between music, space and listener. The understanding of which elements are active and which are passive is especially ambiguous at a time when ambisonic and binaural technologies have become developed enough to provide accurate simulations of the abstract, acoustic qualities of spaces, but on virtual terms. Architects, composers, musicians, engineers and audiences are at a crossroads in the development of new music and experimental, spatiosonic practice. ‘Spatiosonic’ is a hybrid term which is used throughout this article to describe work and phenomena which regard space (spatio) and sound (sonic) as equal, interactive partners. This article considers some of the opportunities and limitations at stake in current techniques of composition, performance and listening.

This paper explores the context and technical and aesthetic considerations behind the author's generative and improvisational audiovisual work, Construction in Zhuangzi (2011), and in particular the approach of ‘audiovisualising’ the same source of data and its validation, and its possibilities as an artistic practice. First, the origins of integrated audiovisual art in the output of John Whitney are explored. Then, metaphors based on musical textures are used to describe different approaches to the audiovisual medium. Research into perception and auditory displays are next used to justify the simultaneous representation of the same data in both the audio and the video. The aesthetic potential of this practice is then corroborated using Michel Chion's theory of sound in cinema. In concluding, its possibilities for providing an appropriate form and aesthetic approach to the audiovisual material are discussed.

Zirkonium is a flexible, non-invasive, open-source program for sound spatialisation over spherical (dome-shaped) loudspeaker setups. By non-invasive, we mean that Zirkonium offers the artist spatialisation capabilities without forcing her to change her usual way of working. This is achieved by supporting a variety of means of designing and controlling spatialisations. Zikonium accommodates user-defined speaker distributions and offers HRTF-based headphone simulation for situations when the actual speaker setup is not available. It can acquire sound sources from files, live input, or via the so-called device mode, which allows Zirkonium to appear to other programs as an audio interface. Control data may be predefined and stored in a file or generated elsewhere and sent over OSC. This paper details Zirkonium, its design philosophy and implementation, and how we have been using it since 2005.