ScreenPlay is a unique interactive computer music system (ICMS) that draws upon various computational styles from within the field of human–computer interaction (HCI) in music, allowing it to transcend the socially contextual boundaries that separate different approaches to ICMS design and implementation, as well as the overarching spheres of experimental/academic and popular electronic musics. A key aspect of ScreenPlay’s design in achieving this is the novel inclusion of topic theory, which also enables ScreenPlay to bridge a gap spanning both time and genre between Classical/Romantic era music and contemporary electronic music; providing new and creative insights into the subject of topic theory and its potential for reappropriation within the sonic arts.

This paper explores the dangers of electroacoustic instruments being lost, from the orphaning of compositions to technological innovations in the field going unnoticed, and presents a case for developing a knowledge base as part of an effort to address these issues. Building in particular on the work of Davies and projects such as EARS, ARiADA and SARA, it explains how taxonomical (hierarchical classification systems) and ontological (more general and in-depth methods for formally collecting information on a domain) approaches should be deployed in this work and outlines some emerging ideas that should be considered when taxonomies and ontologies are developed.

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 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.

Sound art theorists Seth Kim-Cohen and Salomé Voegelin regard the fixed conceptual structures of notation either as an obstacle to pure sensorial engagement with sound (Voegelin 2010), or as the site of arrogant musical exceptionalism (Kim-Cohen 2009). While sound, whether constituted in phenomenological or idealist terms, is evolving and dynamic, notation is characterised by its ossifying imperative (Kim-Cohen 2009; Voegelin 2010). For Voegelin, a music score is regarded as conceptual, not perceptual. It is read as text and, it seems, has no meaningful place within a phenomenological practice of sound art (Voegelin 2010). The criticism that Vogelin’s phenomenalism, in particular, levels at notation invites close examination of notational practice and the semiotic structures that underwrite it. In this article, I seek to challenge the conceptual imperative of fixed notation through the presentation of a case study in the form of an original composition for string quartet and tape. Drawing on research by Rudolf Arnheim and Mark Johnson, a form of notation will be proposed that enables the score to escape singularly semiotic structures so that it may address the dynamic, phenomenological mode of experience that recent theories of sound art imply is beyond the reach of musical notation.

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.

So, this field we call electroacoustic music is celebrating its first half century, just as I did recently. While I cannot say that I actually grew up with this music, I discovered it in my early twenties (1969), and so I have participated in a good twenty-five years of its development. I have also heard a lot about the previous twenty-five years, often from the practitioners themselves, many of whom have unfortunately passed away in the meantime. With any luck I may still have another twenty-five years, and then you will be in my place now, and I wonder what choices you will have made, and what you will be writing to the next generation?

This article seeks to explore the proposed notion of ‘context-based composition’ by examining the nature of ‘real-world’ context. It does this by studying the way in which listeners interpret sounds, working towards a deeper understanding of what it is that we mean by ‘real-world’ sound and context-based composition. These discussions are then utilised to explore the concept of what it means to compose context-based works and suggests that new potentials are opened up by a closer examination of the definition of context-based composition, one which liberates itself from a concern over an absolute physical nature of sounds and which embraces the use of both abstract and referential sounds. This journey highlights the importance of memory and experience within processes of interpretation and the creation of context-based compositions, and questions divisions between the virtual and the real.

In discourse on the topic, the question of what constitutes a musical ‘borrowing’, if raised at all, is usually restricted in scope and framed as one of terminology – that is, of determining the right term to characterise a particular borrowing act. In this way has arisen a welter of terms that, however expressive of nuance, have precluded evaluation of the phenomenon as such. This is in part a consequence of general disregard for the fact that to conceive of musical borrowing entails correlative concepts, all of which precondition it, yet none self-evidently. Further preclusive of clarity, the musico-analytic lens of borrowing is typically invoked only in counterpoint to a quintessentially Western aesthetic category of composition ex nihilo. As a consequence, the fundamental role played by borrowing in musical domains situated at the periphery of the Western art music tradition, specifically pre-modern polyphony and twentieth-century musique concrète, has been overlooked. This article seeks to bridge such lacunae in our understanding of musical borrowing via phenomenological investigation into its conceptual and historical foundations. A more comprehensive evaluation of musical borrowing, one capable of accounting for its diverse instantiations while simultaneously disclosing what makes all of them ‘borrowings’ in the first place, is thereby attainable.

This article specifically addresses electroacoustic music compositions that borrow from existing musical and sound resources. Investigating works that borrow and thrive upon existing sound sources presents an array of issues regarding terminology, authorship and creativity. Embedding borrowed elements into new electroacoustic music goes beyond the simplicity of ‘cut and paste’ as composers approach this practice with new and novel techniques. Musical borrowings have been widely studied in fields of popular and classical music, from cover songs to quotations and from pastiches to theme and variations; however, borrowings that take place within the field of electroacoustic music can be less clear or defined, and demand a closer look. Because the components and building blocks of electroacoustic music are often recorded sound, the categories of borrowing become vast; thus incidences of borrowing, in some shape or form, can appear inevitable or unavoidable when composing. The author takes on this issue and proposes a new framework for categorising borrowings as a helpful aid for others looking to sample in new compositional work, as well as for further musicological study. The article will consider the compositional process of integration and reworking of borrowed material, using a repertoire study to showcase the variety of techniques in play when sound materials change hands, composer to composer. Terminology already in use by others to describe sound borrowing in electroacoustic music will be investigated in an effort to show the multitude of considerations and components in action when borrowing takes place. Motivations for borrowing, borrowing types, borrowing durations, copying as imitation, and composers’ reflections upon borrowing will all be considered within the article, along with discussions on programmatic development and embedding techniques. At the heart of this article, the author aims to show how widespread and pervasive borrowing is within the electroacoustic repertoire by drawing attention to varieties of sound transplants, all considered as acts of borrowing.

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 paper presents recent work in engaging both students and working professionals from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds with the practice of collective and site-specific electroacoustic music creation. The emphasis is placed on embodied, deep listening in tandem with a manual approach to sonic art creation that bridges an understanding of the interplay between digital sound manipulation, larger composed structures and the physical presentation of a work in a given space. Through a practice-oriented approach, participants gain insights into areas such as the abstract world of digital sound recording and representation, the extreme influence on this content enacted by a given sound delivery system and a given space, and the subjective experience of listening to sounds from a variety of orientations and postures, and with varying levels of understanding of the original source recordings. Finally, through a group approach to composing larger structures, participants begin to understand the often mysterious and unsaid processes involved in the normally solitary act of composing electroacoustic music.

Although the pedagogy of music technology more closely resembles that of other academic subjects, the teaching of electroacoustic composition involves a significant degree of creativity, and thus relies on different creativity-specific parts of the brain and memory systems (Lehmann 2007). This paper reviews recent neuroscientific research that may assist differentiation between effective pedagogical approaches of these two subjects where knowledge is stored in separate, discrete and sometimes competing long-term memory locations (Cotterill 2001). It argues that, because of these differences, the learning of music technology and electroacoustic composition is best kept separate, at least in the beginning stages. These points are underscored by an example of a demonstrably failed pedagogical model for teaching electroacoustic composition contrasted with a subsequent highly successful model employed in the same university music programme; an experience that may translate well to other learning environments.

This article proposes a conception of sound as the material of artistic experimentation. It centres on a discussion of the nature of sound’s ontological status and aims to contribute to a new understanding of the role of materiality in artistic practices. A central point of discussion is Pierre Schaeffer’s notion of the sound object, which is critically examined. The phenomenological perspective that underlies the concept of the sound object depicts sound as an ideal unity constituted by a subject’s intentionality. Thus, it can barely grasp the physicality of sounds and their production or their reality beyond individual perception. This article aims to challenge the notion of the sound object as a purely perceptual phenomenon while trying to rethink experimentation as a practical form of thought that takes place through interacting with sonorous material. Against the background of recent object-oriented and materialist philosophical theories and by drawing on the Heideggerian concept of the thing and Gilbert Simondon’s theories of perception and individuation, this article strives to outline a conception of sound as a non-symbolic otherness. The proposed idea of thingness revolves around a morphogenetic conception of the becoming of sonorous forms that links their perception to their physicality.

Electroacoustic music is relatively new and something of an experiment in Malaysia. Involvement in various technology- and art-related performing and composing activities has nurtured my interest, particularly with reference to electroacoustic music.

Unlike visual art, it is not known exactly where and when our historical perspectives in sound art originate, and I would suggest that no electroacoustic music or pieces are known to have been performed or presented in Malaysia since the art form was first pioneered in the West more than fifty years ago.

This paper introduces some thoughts and possibilities relating to electroacoustic music from the Malaysian perspective.

This article introduces research on the influence of teaching on the change of inexperienced listeners’ appreciation of electroacoustic music. A curriculum was developed to make Key Stage 3 students (11–14 years old)1 familiar with electroacoustic music. The curriculum introduced music using concepts, such as music with real-world sounds and music with generated sounds. Presented in an online environment and accompanied with a teachers’ handbook, the curriculum can be used online or as classroom-based teaching resource.

The online environment was developed with the help of user-centred design. Following this, the curriculum was tested in a large-scale study including four Key Stage 3 classes within three schools in Leicester, UK. Data were collected using questionnaires, a listening response test and a summary of the teaching (letter written by participants). Qualitative content analysis was used for the data analysis.

Results include the change of the participants’ appreciation of electroacoustic music during the study. Successful learning and a decrease in alienation towards electroacoustic music could be measured. The study shows that the appreciation of electroacoustic music can be enhanced through the acquirement of conceptual knowledge. Especially important was the enhancing of listening skills following a listening training as well as the broadening of the participants’ vocabulary that enabled them to describe their listening experience.