No art form so rigorously organises time as music. Whereas all art in some sense exists in time, music could be said to be of time. This article, however, questions implicit assumptions about the fundamental nature of time to music. In contrast, an alternative approach to the discourse of composition and analysis is proposed in which space rather than time is privileged. Russolo, Stockhausen, Cage and Agostino Di Scipio are cited as historical precedents where the status of time in music is questioned but a more detailed consideration is given to Ryoji Ikeda, a contemporary sound-art practitioner who, it is argued, represents a turn towards the privileging of space in contemporary music practice. This article argues that an approach to composition that implicitly accepts the primacy of time tends to privilege sounds that are more easily described symbolically, such as notated pitched sounds or materials with clear spectromorphological design. In contrast, an approach that places greater concern with the work in space facilitates the greater use of materials that could be considered ‘noise’, in the sense of both a broadband spectrum and signal disruption.

This article investigates the use of machine learning within contemporary experimental music as a methodology for anthropology, as a transformational engagement that might shape knowing and feeling. In Midlands (2019), Sam Salem presents an (auto)ethnographical account of his relationship to the city of Derby, UK. By deriving musical materials from audio generated by the deep neural network WaveNet, Salem creates an uncanny, not-quite-right representation of his childhood hometown. Similarly, in her album A Late Anthology of Early Music Vol. 1: Ancient to Renaissance (2020), Jennifer Walshe uses the neural network SampleRNN to create a simulated narrative of Western art music. By mapping her own voice onto selected canonical works, Walshe presents both an autoethnographic and anthropological reimagining of a musical past and questions practices of historiography. These works are contextualised within the practice and theory of filmmaker-ethnographer Trinh T. Minh-ha and her notion of ‘speaking nearby’. In extension of Tim Ingold’s conception of anthropology, it is shown that both works make collaborative human and non-human inquiries into the possibilities of human (and non-human) life.

This article considers the ways in which soundwalking and field recording entangle the listener in a sociopolitical relationship with place. The place is a physical site in which the listener encounters complex sonic sociopolitical factors, shaped not just by the interactions of people but also by involving living and material objects that voice themselves through sound and vibrations. Sets of expectations and personal identities inform listening experiences, in addition to the material-orientated tendencies in the field, deriving from soundscape composition and acousmatic music. Specific sociopolitical examples that inform sonic experiences in diverse listening situations across different geographic regions are used to uncover bias, and some of the preconceptions of listeners. The article argues for a greater reflexivity in regard to the motives that inform our listening, relationship with places and awareness of the widest spectrum of cultural, historic and sociopolitical contexts.

Twenty years after the founding of the Karlsuhe ZKM | Center for Art and Media and its Institute for Music and Acoustics, we reexamine the institute’s position with regard to both aesthetic approaches and the 20 years of a reunified Germany. When the broadcasting corporations in West Germany decided to discontinue support for all of their electronic music studios except the Southwest German Radio’s Experimental Studio in Freiburg, the Institute for Music and Acoustics took on a special role that also had an impact on the course of music history in former East Germany. Together with the studio at the Berlin Academy of the Arts, the Institute became a studio for electroacoustic art that served the whole of Germany, though financed by local funding from the City of Karlsruhe and regional funding from the state of Baden-Württemberg. One of the artistic themes pursued at the ZKM’s Institute for Music and Acoustics is the combination of instruments and voice with electronics, for both theatrical settings and purely concert performances. The aspect of real-time composition gives rise to a lasting alteration of the performance situation and the character of the work produced.

This article explores the distribution of creative agency between artists and audiences in participatory sound art through the lens of perspective theory. In contemporary creativity studies, perspective is taken to mean the way in which an actor’s perception of the environment is structured by their intention to act. According to Vlad Glaveanu, constructing and taking new perspectives constitutes a necessary condition for creative acts as it reveals new affordances of the creator’s materials. In this article, I investigate the perspectives of sound artists and participants through ethnographic case studies of Katrine Faber’s participatory performance Let Us Sing Your Place and Benoît Maubrey’s interactive Speaker Sculptures. In Faber’s performance, the participants use their voices to recreate the soundscape of a place described by one of them. Maubrey’s sculptures are large structures built out of loudspeakers through which the participants can play their own sounds via Bluetooth, phone lines or directly plugged-in microphone. Analysing ethnographic observations and interviews with artists and participants in the two case studies, I discuss how their perspectives are constructed and communicated through artwork’s materialities. Exploring the particularity of perspectives induced by participatory sound art, I show how it challenges a number of conventional ideas about sound and auditory culture.