This paper has two main objectives: (i) to discuss essential concepts of the ecological approach to composition, proposing the term eco-composition as a common reference for theoretical perspectives and compositional techniques; and (ii) to present the multimedia piece Vivir sin después, realised within the context of the Paititi Project.

Following the Introduction, the paper is divided into two main sections. In section 2 we discuss issues raised by the application of the ecological approach to composition. Regarding the data-gathering procedures, eco-composition provides two effective methods: re-enaction and anchoring. Organisation of sonic materials is done through accumulation of heterarchical layers, giving rise to emergent musical phenomena. Section 3 dwells on the compositional strategies applied in the multimedia installation Vivir sin después. We describe the process of re-enacting the first Spanish trip through the Amazon River Basin, carried out by Francisco de Orellana and fifty-nine Spaniards in 1541. Then we address technical aspects of the piece, such as the application of multiple views of single entities, the development of non-hierarchical forms and the manipulation of sonic fields.

This article presents recent developments in actuated musical instruments created by the authors, who also describe an ecosystemic model of actuated performance activities that blur traditional boundaries between the physical and virtual elements of musical interfaces. Actuated musical instruments are physical instruments that have been endowed with virtual qualities controlled by a computer in real-time but which are nevertheless tangible. These instruments provide intuitive and engaging new forms of interaction. They are different from traditional (acoustic) and fully automated (robotic) instruments in that they produce sound via vibrating element(s) that are co-manipulated by humans and electromechanical systems. We examine the possibilities that arise when such instruments are played in different performative environments and music-making scenarios, and we postulate that such designs may give rise to new methods of musical performance. The Haptic Drum, the Feedback Resonance Guitar, the Electromagnetically Prepared Piano, the Overtone Fiddle and Teleoperation with Robothands are described, along with musical examples and reflections on the emergent properties of the performance ecologies that these instruments enable. We look at some of the conceptual and perceptual issues introduced by actuated musical instruments, and finally we propose some directions in which such research may be headed in the future.

In this paper we describe a new way of thinking about musical tones, specifically in the context of how features of a sound might be controlled by computer musicians, and how those features might be most appropriately mapped onto musical controllers. Our approach is the consequence of one bias that we should reveal at the outset: we believe that electronically controlled (and this includes computer-controlled)musical instruments need to be emancipated from the keyboard metaphor; although piano-like keyboards are convenient and familiar, they limit the musician's expressiveness (Mathews 1991, Vertegaal and Eaglestone 1996, Paradiso 1997, Levitin and Adams 1998). This is especially true in the domain of computer music,in which timbres can be created that go far beyond the physical constraints of traditional acoustic instruments.

This article provides an overview of sound art, encompassing its history and artistic development, and the complexities of the term’s use as a categorisation. It starts with various definitions employed and the ways that recent museum exhibitions have left the genre’s parameters seemingly open-ended, as well as the problems to be faced in finding a ‘frame’ for sound in an exhibition setting. The article then lays out the roots of the form’s aesthetics, including the disjunction between sound and image afforded by the invention of recording, musique concrète, and spatialised composition through the centuries. Sound art’s relationships to the 60s art movement Earthworks, ambient music, sound by visual artists, architecture, sound sculpture, surveillance, sound design and sound ecology are explored to contextualise its significance not only to different disciplines within the arts to but sound’s place in contemporary society. At the conclusion, two recent works by D.A.M.A.G.E. and David Byrne, which loom somewhere in-between music and sound art, are considered in light of the increasingly fluid interpretation of sound art’s identity.

This article adopts an ecological view of digital musical interactions, considering first the relationship between performers and digital systems, and then spectators’ perception of these interactions. We provide evidence that the relationships between performers and digital music systems are not necessarily instrumental in the same was as they are with acoustic systems, and nor should they always strive to be. Furthermore, we report results of a study indicating that spectators may not perceive such interactions in the same way as performances with acoustic musical instruments. We present implications for the design of digital musical interactions, suggesting that designers should embrace the reality that digital systems are malleable and dynamic, and may engage performers and spectators in different modalities, sometimes simultaneously.

The use of a laptop computer for musical performance has become widespread in the electronic music community. It brings with it many issues pertaining to the communication of musical intent. Critics argue that performances of this nature fail to engage audiences because many performers use the mouse and/or computer keyboard to control their musical works, leaving no visual cues to guide the audience as to the correlation between performance gestures and musical outcomes. The author will argue that interfaces need to communicate something of their task and that cognitive affordances (Gibson 1979) associated with the performance interface become paramount if the musical outcomes are to be perceived as clearly tied to real-time performance gestures – in other words, that the audience are witnessing the creation of the music in that moment as distinct to the manipulation of pre-recorded or pre-sequenced events. Interfaces of his kind lend themselves particularly to electroacoustic and computer music performance where timbre, texture and morphology may be paramount.

The significant role of visual communication in modern computer applications is indisputable. In the case of music, various attempts have been made from time to time to translate non-visual ideas into visual codes (see Walters 1997 for a collection of graphic scores from the late computer music pioneer Iannis Xenakis, John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and others). In computer music research, most current sound design tools allow the direct manipulation of visual representations of sound such as time-domain and frequency-domain representations, with the most notable examples being the UPIC system (Xenakis 1992), Phonogramme (Lesbros 1996), Lemur (Fitz and Haken 1997), and MetaSynth (Wenger 1998), among others. Associations between auditory and visual dimensions have also been extensively studied in other scientific domains such as visual perception and cognitive psychology, as well as inspired new forms of artistic expression (see, for example, Wells 1980; Goldberg and Schrack 1986; Whitney 1991).

In the context of current developments towards an exchange format for spatial audio, it is important to consider the interactions and tensions between spatial composition techniques and spatial audio technologies. This paper gives an overview of common compositional techniques and audio technologies used for spatial compositions, and discusses various forms of hybrid uses of audio technologies. A spatial composition created using certain audio technologies may lose integrity when transferred to another audio technology, when the compositional intent is not taken into account. Tools that are flexible with regard to the spatial audio reproduction technology applied are useful for the comparison of various spatialisation methods during the compositional process, but are also essential to enable a hybrid use of technologies within one composition.

Since the mid-1980s commercial digital samplers have become widespread. The idea of musical instruments which have no sounds of their own is, however, much older, not just in the form of analogue samplers like the Mellotron, but in ancient myths and legends from China and elsewhere. This history of both digital and analogue samplers relates the latter to the early musique concrète of Pierre Schaeffer and others, and also describes a variety of one-off systems devised by composers and performers.

Sixty years ago, musique concrète was born of the single-handed efforts of one man, Pierre Schaeffer. How did the first experiments become a School and produce so many rich works? As this issue of Organised Sound addresses various aspects of the GRM activities throughout sixty years of musical adventure, this article discusses the musical thoughts behind the advent and the development of the music created and theoretised at the Paris School formed by the Schaefferian endeavours. Particular attention is given to the early twentieth-century conceptions of musical sounds and how poets, artists and musicians were expressing their quest for, as Apollinaire put it, ‘new sounds new sounds new sounds’. The questions of naming, gesture, sound capture, processing and diffusion are part of the concepts thoroughly revisited by the GRMC, then the GRM in 1958, up to what is known as acousmatic music. Other contributions, such as Teruggi's, give readers insight into the technical environments and innovations that took place at the GRM. This present article focuses on the remarkable unity of the GRM. This unity has existed alongside sixty years of activity and dialogue with researchers of other fields and constant attention to the latter-day scientific, technological and philosophical ideas which have had a strong influence in shaping the development of GRM over the course of its history.

Composers have spent more than fifty years devising computer programs for the semi-automated production of music. This article shall focus in particular on the case of minimal run-time human intervention, where a program allows the creation of a musical variation, typically unravelling in realtime, on demand. These systems have the capacity to vary their output with each run, often from no more input information than the seeding of a random number generator with the start time. Such artworks are accumulating, released online as downloads, or exhibited through streaming radio sites such as rand()%. Listener/users and composer/designers may wish for deeper insight into these programs' ontological status, mechanisms and creative potential. These works are challenging to dissect; this article makes a tentative start at confronting the unique problems and rich behaviours of computer-program-based generative music, from the social and historical context to the backwards engineering of programs in relation to their sound world. After a discussion of exemplars and definitions of generative art, strategies for analysis are outlined. To provide practical examples, analyses are provided of two small scale works by James McCartney.

This paper questions and examines the validity and future of interactive network performance. The history of research in the area is described as well as experiments with our own system. Our custom-built networked framework, known as GIGAPOPR, transfers high-quality audio, video and MIDI data over a network connection to enable live musical performances to occur in two or more distinct locations. One of our first sensor-augmented Indian instruments, The Electronic Dholak (EDholak) is a multi-player networked percussion controller that is modelled after the traditional Indian Dholak. The EDholaks trigger sound, including samples and physical models, and visualisation, using our custom-built networked visualisation software, known as veldt.

Physical modelling of musical instruments is an exciting new paradigm in digital sound synthesis. The basic idea is to imitate the sound production mechanism of an acoustic musical instrument using a computer program. The sound produced by such a model will automatically resemble that of the real instrument, if the model has been devised in a proper way. In this article we review the history and present techniques of physical modelling. It appears that the many seemingly very different modelling methods try to achieve the same result: to simulate the solutions of the wave equation in a simplified manner. We concentrate on the digital waveguide modelling technique which has gained much popularity among both researchers and engineers in the music technology industry. The benefits and drawbacks of the new technology are considered, and concurrent research topics are discussed. The physical modelling approach offers many new applications, especially in the fields of multimedia and virtual reality.

Sound diffusion – the realtime (usually manual) control of the relative levels and spatial deployment during performance – is one of the most contentious issues in the field of electroacoustic music. There are parts of the world where the practice is virtually unknown; in other places it is the norm and appropriate facilities would be provided as a matter of course for any visiting composer or performer. These ‘local variations’ are not merely ripples on the surface of a standardised performance practice but stem from underlying attitudes to what composition and performance in this medium are about and, ultimately, to a definition of music itself. What follows summarises observations drawn from fifteen years of working with the BEAST concert diffusion system in numerous performance spaces in the UK and Europe, as well as experiencing, both as listener and performer, other systems in Europe and North America. Scientific rigour, in the normally accepted sense of tables of measurements etc., is not my goal – my portable measuring equipment has been my ears, and my conclusions are based on what I have heard.

Based on innumerable informal accounts and a number of scientific studies, there can be no doubt that people often have quite vivid images of musical sound in their minds, and that this is the case regardless of levels of musical training. Various introspective accounts and more recent neurocognitive research seem to converge in suggesting that imagery for music is closely linked with imagery for music-related actions. In this paper, the consequences of sound–action links for our notions of the sonic image are discussed, with a particular focus on the relationship between sonic objects and action chunks. In conclusion, the exploitation of action imagery is seen as holding great promise in enhancing our means for musical imagery in various creative, research and educational contexts.

Since its conception, Denis Smalley's spectromorphology has equipped listeners and practitioners of electroacoustic music with appropriate and relevant vocabulary to describe the sound-shapes, sensations and evocations associated with experiences of acousmatic sound. This liberation has facilitated and permitted much-needed discussion about sound events, structures and other significant sonic detail. More than 20 years on, it is safe to assume that within the electroacoustic music community there is an agreed and collective understanding of spectromorphological vocabulary and its descriptive application. Spectromorphology's influence has been far reaching, inciting approaches to electroacoustic music analysis (Thoresen 2007), notation (Patton 2007), composition and education through its flexible functionality and accessible pool of vocabulary.

The Intention/Reception (I/R) project concerns an investigation of the relationship between composer intention and listener response in electroacoustic (E/A) compositions. Phase one of the project focuses on E/A compositions that contain or are perceived to contain real-world sound references (RWE/A). The methodology involves introducing works that are unknown to the listening subjects and then evaluating their listening experience. Through repeated listening and the introduction of the composers' articulation of intent (through a work's title, inspiration, elements that the composer intends to be communicated, eventually elements of the compositional process itself – in short, the ‘dramaturgy’ of the work) listening responses are monitored. The purpose here is to investigate to what extent familiarity contributes to access and appreciation and to what extent intention and reception are meeting in this particular corpus of E/A art music.

This paper offers an introduction to the I/R project outlining its background, its context and presenting pertinent points concerning the design and operation of its methodology. Following this, some of the key results discovered thus far, including the first presentation of test data that formed the basis of the conclusions of a recently completed doctoral thesis, will be shared.

This article explores how computation opens up possibilities for new musical practices to emerge through technology design. Using the notion of the cultural probe as a lens, we consider the digital musical instrument as an experimental device that yields findings across the fields of music, sociology and acoustics. As part of an artistic-research methodology, the instrumental object as a probe is offered as a means for artists to answer questions that are often formulated outside semantic language. This article considers how computation plays an important role in the authors’ personal performance practices in different ways, which reflect the changed mode-of-being of new musical instruments and our individual and collective relations with them.

When studying the history and evolution of the GRM, one of its outstanding features has been its continuous energy dedicated to developing machines, systems and, in recent years, software that would better serve composers' views and intentions. Unique discoveries were made that have become the fundamental concepts of sound manipulation and have influenced researchers and developers in the conception of new, but always somehow faithful to the original, tools for composition. Many steps pave this road, some are known and recognised, others were necessary failures that permitted inventors to re-focus and realise their thoughts.

This article presents a theoretical framework for the design of expressive musical instruments, the Musical Interface Technology Design Space: MITDS. The activities of imagining, designing and building new musical instruments, performing, composing, and improvising with them, and analysing the whole process in an effort to better understand the interface, our physical and cognitive associations with it, and the relationship between performer, instrument and audience can only be seen as an ongoing iterative work-in-progress. It is long-term evolutionary research, as each generation of a new musical instrument requires inventiveness and years of dedication towards the practice and mastery of its performance system (comprising the interface, synthesis and the mappings between them). Many revisions of the system may be required in order to develop musical interface technologies that enable us to achieve truly expressive performances. The MITDS provides a conceptual framework for describing, analysing, designing and extending the interfaces, mappings, synthesis algorithms and performance techniques for interactive musical instruments. It provides designers with a theoretical base to draw upon when creating technologically advanced performance systems, and can be seen as a set of guidelines for analysis, and a taxonomy of design patterns for interactivity in musical instruments. The MITDS focuses mainly on human-centred design approaches to realtime control of the multidimensional parameter spaces in musical composition and performance, where the primary objective is to close the gap between human gestures and complex synthesis methods.