This article concerns the temporal experience of acousmatic music, how the music can impact a listener’s sense of time passing and the implications of memory and expectations of auditory events and their perceived connections to one another. It will outline how memory and schemas lead to predictions in the immediate future and larger expectations of a work’s form. An overview of the temporal listening framework for acousmatic music will be provided to show the interrelationship between memory and expectations and how they influence one’s listening focus in the present. Trevor Wishart’s Imago will be used to illustrate how one might compose an acousmatic work to promote active listening using compositional techniques that engage personal schemas and those built through the course of experiencing the piece.

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.

This article considers the concept of a ‘language of things’, which Pierre Schaeffer developed in his early work, the Essai sur la radio et le cinema (1941–42). On the basis of a careful consideration of this text, it will appear that the ‘language of things’ engages a specific posture that shows, in the process of concrete music’s emergence, two distinct but interrelated aspects: one concerning things themselves and the other concerning language. It is this knot, this interwovenness, that we will try to understand in this article. The article will show that the promotion of noise is directly linked to the deconstruction of language and that these two processes, which can be precisely identified in Schaeffer’s early works, refer to a fundamental switch, signalling the birth of musique concrète.

The theme chosen for Vol. 2 No 1 of Organized Sound is one which the editors hope will become a thread for future issues. The reader may be curious why this subject has been chosen.

Acouscapes is a software designed as a simple educational solution for the creation of soundscapes and their use in the composition of soundscape music in primary and secondary education. The software has slots in which the user must place the sounds that will make up the desired soundscape, allowing them to make different soundwalks by interacting with the graphic interface. Acouscapes allows the content of these soundscapes to be modified by means of sound and structural processing, and includes a recording function. This article aims to present the conceptual and educational foundations of Acouscapes, to describe the software technically and functionally, and to offer some applications of this software as a mediation artefact in educational processes.

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.

Cold, stripped-down, monochrome, pixelated, iterative, quantised, grid, pulse, glitch, noise: taken together, these words imply a growing aesthetic connection within a body of experimental and independent (or non-academic) sound-based artworks produced in the past few decades. Although realised in different mediums and belonging to different artistic categories, such works are connected through a certain aesthetic sensibility. Nevertheless, since the majority of these works have thus far received little scholarly attention, a framing discussion of the aesthetic principles and features that link them is overdue. This article examines this emergent phenomenon, accounting for the particular aesthetic features that connect such sound-based artworks, arguing for a more specific terminology to adequately account for this aesthetic across the various practices in which it is observed. Rejecting ‘minimalist’ as a descriptor, this article calls for an aesthetic frame of reference derived through Brutalism, understood as a crystallisation of key features of modernism and its various movements. The first author’s work is presented as a conscious effort to create sound art redolent of Brutalism, locating this work in the context of the revival of Brutalism in recent years, which, as will be argued, can be expanded to works from a wide range of contemporary artists and musicians.

The design of sonic environments is in need of more active strategies, taking into account not only the physical but also the social and sensorial aspects of a place. This implies abandoning traditional, mono-disciplinary responses in favour of interdisciplinary methods and approaches. In this study we explored the possibility of inserting context-sensitive sound textures to improve the experience of an activity-based office workplace. For this purpose, we developed the concept of the ‘sound bubble’ – a micro-space in which the user is embedded by a semi-transparent added sound environment that will operate as a subtle sound mask, attracting the attention without needing to hide the disturbing environment. This should help users (the workers) to stay in an ‘everyday listening’ mode. This means, not focusing on the environment in particular but on their tasks, while preserving the link with the surrounding space and activities.

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.

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.

Stochastic, unvoiced sounds are abundant in music and musical sounds. Without irregularities, the music and sounds become dull and lifeless. This paper presents work on unvoiced sounds that is believed to be useful in noise music. Several methods for obtaining a gradual change towards static white noise are presented. The random values (Dice), random events (Geiger) and random frequencies (Cymbal) noise types are shown to produce many useful sounds. Atomic noise encompasses all three noise types, while adding much more subtle variations and more life to the noise. Methods for obtaining a harmonic sound from the noise are introduced. These methods take advantage of the stochastic nature of the model, facilitating a gradual change from the stochastic sound to the noisy harmonic sound. In addition, the frozen noise repetitions are shown to produce unexpected pitch jumps with a potentially useful musical structure.

This article examines the use of Complexity Theory as an inspiration for the creation of new musical works, and highlights problems and possible solutions associated with its application as a compositional tool. In particular it explores how the philosophy behind Complexity Theory affects notions of process-based composition, indeterminacy in music and the performer/listener/environment relationship, culminating in providing a basis for the understanding of music creation as an active process within a context. The author presents one of his own sound installations, Cross-Pollination, as an example of a composition inspired and best understood from the philosophical position as described in Complexity Theory.

The paper examines issues emergent from the construction of my work the bird ghost at the zaouia, which transliterates recorded experience and memory of time and place. Islamic ritual and public spaces were recorded, reworked, re-routed and re-sited in a work that references, comments upon and potentially reconfigures the Islamic sonic-social. Tracing my own stance, the paper foregrounds emergent issues in the recording and use of highly culturally freighted sounds. I trace three broad areas: 1. Sonic Orientalism – the use of sound that carries ‘Eastern’ cultural and religious significance in order to signal a certain kind of alterity; 2. The development of a compositional strategy that seeks a middle-path between acousmatic and acoustic-ecological debates; and 3. A cross-cultural comparison between modes of listening. In addition I discuss the contexts of debates on the permissibility of music within Islam, and also world-musics that trade on the romanticised alterity of sonic tourism. I draw parallels between an ‘ethically responsive sensorium’ characteristic of Islamic aural disciplines and the ‘aesthetically attuned sensorium’ engaged by sonic arts. I argue for an approach that is inclusive of the sonic and the full spectrum of vibration through ramified networks of memory and meaning.

Audio excerpts available at: www.sethayyaz.com/sound-works/bird-ghost-at-the-zaouia

Part of my listening experience has been a coming to terms with a certain set of musical forms that I call ‘flat’. Music in flat form means music that avoids obvious or dimensionally conjunct large-scale goals, points of arrival, ‘climaxes’, sectional boundaries, and the like, and therefore has proven difficult for many listeners. It has become clear to me that this music demands a different listening approach, one at odds with the way music is typically appreciated in the concert hall. This approach is one that composers of music in flat form can facilitate through today's computer-music resources. What I present here is a specific instance of such an approach: my composition Sand, a twenty-five-minute long work for computer-synthesised and processed sounds, was composed specifically to be experienced through a computer-music interface I built in the MAX/MSP environment. This paper explores what I mean by ‘flatness’, how I came to terms with it as a listener, and how this coming-to-terms spawned the idea and construction of the interface. I then discuss the interface itself, the process of interaction with the listener, and technical aspects of the software.

In a previous edition of Organised Sound, I discussed the potential for using the North Indian sarode in electroacoustic music. In that article, I explored how electroacoustic music artists manage to integrate multiple cultural frameworks, while also acknowledging the importance of personal artistic agency. The primary question that emerged from that research is extended in this article: how does an electroacoustic performer of a non-Western instrument improvise outside the idiom of their tradition? In order to address this question, I draw on Tomlinson’s concept of the metaphysical imaginary. In my own performance practice, I employ the metaphysical imaginary as a framework to explore a transcultural, transcendent, perhaps even spiritual potential of electroacoustic improvisation. The metaphysical imaginary will be explored in two dimensions: the synchronic and the diachronic. The synchronic dimension looks horizontally across cultures, while the diachronic dimension looks in a temporal verticality, looking inwards and downwards, to a time before modern culture. In the article, I discuss the performance practice of other musicians working across different cultural frames who explore the metaphysical in their improvisations. The article also looks backwards in cultural historical time and investigates how improvisers draw inspiration from a pre-modern cultural world, combining these imaginaries with modern sound techniques. I will situate my own work within this mosaic of practices, concluding with a discussion of electroacoustic improvisations using the sarode, extended technique and the re-imagining of pre-historic sonic rituals.

Pipe organs are complex timbral synthesisers in an early acousmatic setting, which have always accompanied the evolution of music and technology. The most recent development is digital augmentation: the organ sound is captured, transformed and then played back in real time. The present augmented organ project relies on three main aesthetic principles: microphony, fusion and instrumentality. Microphony means that sounds are captured inside the organ case, close to the pipes. Real-time audio effects are then applied to the internal sounds before they are played back over loudspeakers; the transformed sounds interact with the original sounds of the pipe organ. The fusion principle exploits the blending effect of the acoustic space surrounding the instrument; the room response transforms the sounds of many single-sound sources into a consistent and organ-typical soundscape at the listener’s position. The instrumentality principle restricts electroacoustic processing to organ sounds only, excluding non-organ sound sources or samples. This article proposes a taxonomy of musical effects. It discusses aesthetic questions concerning the perceptual fusion of acoustic and electronic sources. Both extended playing techniques and digital audio can create musical gestures that conjoin the heterogeneous sonic worlds of pipe organs and electronics. This results in a paradoxical listening experience of unity in the diversity: the music is at the same time electroacoustic and instrumental.