Through a musical examination of The Hands (Movement 1) (1986), this article reveals musical developments of Michel Waisvisz’s early performance practice with The Hands. Waisvisz’s digital musical instrument, The Hands, helped shape the body as a recognisable agent of musical structure; this article details how the instrument controls relate to musical gesture and reveals the physical efforts of the composer through spectral analyses of the sound recording and an investigation of a 1987 performance video. The rich context of The Hands – the instrument controls, Waisvisz’s decades-long dedication to the instrument’s potential and, more centrally, the exploration of human effort in performance – have made this pioneering live-performance system for electronic music stand for more than just a musical instrument. Many authors cite Michel Waisvisz’s Hands technology but few provide musical analyses of Waisvisz’s music. The musical analysis of The Hands (Movement 1) (1986) highlights the art practice of a seminal composer–performer through one of his most important digital musical instruments and signals how the body became an instrument for playing digital electronic music.

This article draws on a practice theory perspective to investigate instances of sound practice in a particular community of technology use by focusing on the community and product offerings in and around contemporary modular synthesisers and their growing popularity in the ‘Eurorack’ format in order to investigate the attraction and allure of analogue things in a digital age. This article identifies issues of authenticity, legitimacy and creativity as key drivers of the way we project our identities onto objects and the intimate technologies we own, and the search for meaningful technological encounters. In the realm of sound practice, the follow-up questions are similar: why when there is software and affordable digital alternatives, do some musicians swear by modular synthesis given the commitment this practice requires in terms of money, time, self-education and exploration (and for a lack of a better term) tinkering? With Eurorack as a case study, this article investigates the attraction and allure of analogue things in a digital age by investigating meaningful sound practice as emerging out of the discourses of online communities around the modular synth phenomenon.

Through an ecological approach to creative practice (henceforth ecomprovisation), this project deals with the expansion of creative strategies applicable to everyday contexts. Within ubiquitous music (ubimus), we target the convergence of sonification methods with the application of ecological models within the context of comprovisation. These conceptual frameworks inform the technological and aesthetic approaches applied in the making of Markarian 335. We describe the creative procedures and the implications of the design choices involved in this artwork. The contributions and shortcomings of our ecomprovisational approach are situated within the context of the current efforts to foster expanded creative possibilities in ubimus endeavours.

In this paper I discuss Hysteria, a work for trombone and four-channel tape. Abbie Conant, an internationally reco gnised trombonist, commissioned and performed Hysteria as part of her ‘Wired Goddess’ project. I chose five lines of poetry from John Campion's Tongue Stones: ‘matter/mater/meter/muthos’, ‘bowl of regeneration/quickener of wombs’, ‘follow the mysteries of your feet’, ‘Let dark ages be crucibles’ and ‘wounds like flowers opening’. With this text I created an implex of sonic images relating the body, fertility, menses and violence. The first line is particularly important and shapes the first two-thirds of the piece. The musical material complements the text and uses periodicity to suggest the body's heartbeat and breath. The heartbeat serves as a cantus firmus, occurring every five seconds, and pedal tones form the primary material for the trombone part and connect to the idea of breath. The punctuating gunshots occurring in the first half imply violence, and the dark red lighting suggests blood. The tape and trombone intertwine in a sonic world evoking the womb and regeneration. The four-channel tape heightens the sense of immersion that connected to the piece's resonance and dream-like atmosphere. The web of these associations constitutes an artistic reflection on the sensibility and experience of the feminine in a patriarchal society.

This article looks at the emergence of physical material in a growing number of contemporary sound-based art practices. From academic symposia to music festivals and media art exhibitions, the material presence of physical artefacts is notable in a variety of sound-based disciplines and scenarios. Considering the significance of the visual aspect of these works, this article proposes a reassessment of what audiovisual entails. I argue that our understanding of audiovisual status needs to be expanded beyond the scope of screen-based applications and move into the physical realm of objects and material. Further to this, I outline how the dominant discussions around materiality in sound-based art do not speak sufficiently to the physical materiality manifested in a growing wave within the field. Using an example of my own creative work, I will then suggest audiovisual materialism as an alternative lens through which such practices can be better examined, understood and built upon.

Music acoustics research can provide support in terms of objective knowledge to further the rapidly developing areas of music technology and audio processing. This is illustrated by three examples taken from current projects at KTH. One concerns the improvement in quality of sound reproduction systems over the last century. A test, where expert listeners rated the year of recordings of different ages, demonstrated that significant advances were made between 1950 and 1970, while development was rather modest before and after this period. The second example investigates the secrets of timbral beauty. Acoustic analyses of recordings of an international opera tenor and a singer with an extremely unpleasant voice shed some light on the basic requirements of good vocal timbre. The unpleasant voice is found to suffer from pressed phonation, lack of a singer's formant, irregular vibrato and insufficient pitch accuracy. The third example elucidates tuning and phrasing differences between deadpan performances of MIDI files played on synthesizers and performances by musicians on real instruments. The examples suggest that future development in the areas of music technology and audio processing may gain considerably from a close interaction with music acoustics research.

Following Marshall McLuhan's concept of a global village as a form of universal organisation in a technically dominated world, terms of globality and locality, and the concepts of world and village as social constructions in order to organise perception in an enhanced social environment are discussed in matters of their relevance in the context of electroacoustic music and especially its studies. In relation to historical as well as to more theoretical examples from the field of electroacoustic music, problems of perceiving spaces, places and locations are introduced. The solutions proposed here are primarily based on system theory approaches (as for instance Luhmann and Bühl) and newer network theory concepts (as for example Castells and Nowotny). The network is proposed as a kind of explanatory model in today's media-dominated world. Focusing on a model oriented to difference, ‘global’ and ‘local’ are regarded as categories guiding perception in matters of equality and difference. In this way the problem of listening to the other in opposition to the self is introduced. Thus it is demonstrated that there can never be a global sound or even a sounding globality. The phenomenon of soundscapes is discussed as a central theme in relation to its role as a listening strategy, its appearance in music and its own musicality.

K-k-k-k-k-k. Boof. Chhhhhhh. Hiss, whirr, pfing: 12k's is an onomatopoeic music. The audio equivalent of concrete poetry perhaps, where the sign (there, a letter or a word; here, a click or thud or tone) is elephantised, blown out of proportion, simultaneously stripped of reference and fraught with multivalent meaning. (Is it any coincidence that 12k founder Taylor Deupree is a graphic designer? You can almost hear the flip of a serif in 12k's grainy whoosh, or the nuzzling of kiss-kerned type in the cool brush of two bleeps.) In the releases of this Brooklyn label, notes, pulses, textures bear no immediate relation to the world around them, to a language of melody or tonal narrative, but in their careful melding of pulse and grain, they sketch an abstracted narrative of the development of several phenomena: electronic music, desktop DIY, and -especially -minimalism.

Portraits polychromes are a series of books associated with multimedia documents presented on the Internet site of the GRM since 2001. In releasing this collection, our primary concern was to increase awareness of the electroacoustic repertoire and the reserves in the GRM archives. The GRM, being a pioneering centre of electroacoustics, is fortunate to possess a consistent and significant reserve dating back to the beginning of the 1950s. At present, the catalogue contains around 2,000 works, accompanied with supplementary documents: composer's biographies, reviews, photographs, documentary movies, radio broadcasts, recorded public lectures, theoretical research work, transcriptions and analyses. In addition to the heritage value of the GRM's collection, the enterprise of the Portraits polychromes, with the aid of multimedia tools, aims to advance the progress of research on analysis and the transcription of musical works.

Art always does more than subsist upon technical progress; for centuries its practice has merged with it, and we should never forget that the first meaning of the word art was technê. However, never before has the relationship between art and technology raised so many questions and provoked so much misunderstanding. As a matter of fact, at the same time as the frontiers of technique continue to recede, the frontiers of art seem more and more difficult to grasp. (Couchot and Hillaire 2003: 15)

The author's Construction in Self (2009) belongs to the interdisciplinary context of auditory display/music. Its use of data at audio rate could be described as both audification and non-standard synthesis. The possibilities of audio-rate data use and the relation between the above descriptions are explored, and then used to develop a conceptual and theoretical basis of the work.

Vickers and Hogg's term ‘indexicality’ is used to contrast audio with control rate. The conceptual implications of its use within the digital medium and the possibility for the formation of higher-order structures are discussed. Grond and Hermann's notion of ‘familiarity’ is used to illustrate the difference between audification and non-standard synthesis, and the contexts of auditory display and music respectively. Familiarity is given as being determined by Dombois and Eckel's categories of data. Kubisch's Electrical Walks, Xenakis's GENDYN and the audification of seismograms are used as examples. Bogost's concept of the alien is introduced, and its relevance to the New Aesthetic and Algorave are discussed. Sound examples from Construction in Self are used to demonstrate the varying levels of familiarity or noise possible and suggested as providing a way of bridging the divide between institutional and underground electronic music.

In this article, and within the context of sound art as a basis for artistic freedom in experimental music and art, the development of pendulum-based sculptural instruments and an improvisational form of video called ‘percussive video’ are described. Methods used to produce time-based public art events are also outlined, and their effectiveness in directing social change at the local level is discussed.

There is a rich literature on the design of formal languages for music representation on computers. Over the last thirty years, several generations of software technology have been applied to this problem, including structured software engineering, artificial intelligence, and object-oriented (O-O) software technology. This article introduces the basic notions of O-O software technology, and investigates how these might be useful for music representation. In particular, the author's Smalltalk music object kernel (Smoke) music representation language is described and examples given that illustrate the most important of Smoke's features.

OB-scene is a performance centred on a live sonification of biological data gathered in real-time with a medical vaginal probe (photoplethysmograph), made by the author. The use of the photoplethysmograph, which takes inspiration from the first medical vaginal probes used for diagnostic purposes by Masters and Johnson (1966) introduces a media-archaeological aspect to this work. Data gathered through the probe is processed and transformed into sound and visuals projected in the exhibition space. OB-scene takes inspiration from Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter (2010) in which she argues that human agency has echoes in non-human nature and vice versa, shifting away from anthropocentrism towards the concept of ‘vital materiality’ that runs across bodies, both humans and unhuman. Furthermore, OB-scene is affiliated with an emerging movement of women and technology called ‘XenoFeminism’ (XF). It introduces the idea of techno-alienation and focuses on the concept of other/diverse desires, new forms of desiring, experiencing something other (Laboria Cuboniks 2015). In this specific work, this takes the form of a technofeminism incorporating the fluid, the non-human and the diverse. In this performance, the body is fused with the technology, rather than empowered or enhanced by technology itself, body and technology become a unique actant (Latour 2009) enabling the audience to experience the sensorial assemblage as a space for communal experience with political implications. OB-scene is as an immersive environmental work where the senses, affect and memory were key features of ‘assemblage thinking’ (Hamilakis 2017).

A range of material objects can be transformed into sound emitters by the induction of audio-rate vibration with structure-borne sound drivers. The resulting acoustically activated physical objects offer the possibility to extend the compositional gesture towards the material environment, providing a literal re-reading of Schaeffer’s objet sonore concept. Engaging sound in physical objects ties the creative gesture to its surroundings, grounding the approach in an inherently situated dimension. This article examines the compositional strategies emerging from diffusing sound via physical objects, such as sound spatialisation, audiovisual sculpture and audiotactility in concert setting, illustrated by four case studies of recent aural artwork. On the basis of the case studies, the aesthetic implications of materially mediated aural art are discussed, in relation with the ideal of purity represented by the high-fidelity loudspeaker. While the technological development of the loudspeaker aims for a perfect reproduction of an idealised and autonomous sound, materially mediated sound diffusion merges sound and matter into an agglomerate where the sound can no longer be perceived as an autonomous entity, but rather in relation to its material source. Engaging electronic musicianship in materiality gives rise to a hybrid setting at the interface of the digital, the material and the human, where the context – the environment of sound-emitting objects – becomes an object of composition.

This paper presents an interactive sound design and interactive composition aesthetic. Three projects are presented as case studies and underline the importance of audience involvement: From snow [to space to movement] to sound (2011), Melodic walk (2012) and Points… (2012). All three projects have been designed, implemented and put in practice, and outline the aesthetic vision and approach of the authors. In the examples above, elements of interactive performance, sound installation and architectural design are blended together in order to deliver a sonic result, where the audience plays a central role. The members of the audience interact directly with the artworks, and as a result become part of the installation. Moreover, by bringing their own content into the interactive scenario, they also become contributors. The architectural space is an important parameter, as the spatial design is key to audience interaction with the music. Technical and aesthetic aspects are presented alongside the experiences of the audience/participants/contributors.

Spiral Fiction is a piece of interactive performance staged by the authors in 2002. The paper provides detailed information about the technology used, the nature of the interactivity employed, the artists use of the Bodycoder System© and the aesthetic and theoretical issues arising out of the work. The paper addresses the problematic nature of the audience gaze, the seductive qualities of new technology, creative balance in the presence of new technologies and the problem of placing interactive performance along side analogue and single art form disciplines. The paper also explores the psychophysical nature of the interactivity associated with the Bodycoder System and will discuss cross-modal perception and sensation. The authors draw on aspects of postmodern theory to further expand their observations.