Yarlung Zangbo is a multimedia symphony combining orchestra, visual images and electroacoustic music by one of China’s most internationally influential electroacoustic music composers, Zhang Xiaofu. This article focuses on the spatial aspects of Yarlung Zangbo. First, we discuss two different spatial composition preferences in electroacoustic music: image delivery and creation. We then divide the development of electroacoustic orchestral music into three different periods and examine the general spatial intention of the works in these periods. Finally, we analyse and identify four spatial composition strategies of Yarlung Zangbo: equity, virtuosity, diversity and unity. The successful utilisation of these strategies has not only made the piece a milestone in Chinese electroacoustic music, but also a unique and meaningful contribution to the electroacoustic music repertoire worldwide. We believe this article will provide valuable knowledge and insight for future research and practice of spatial composition.

This paper illustrates the early period of electroacoustic music in Japan through an intensive examination of the source materials for historiography and analytical study, trying to illuminate the reception of Western techniques by Japanese composers, examining the rudiments of their original creative ideas. An extensive list of Japanese works with information about their accessible manuscripts, literature and available recordings is provided. All quotations from the articles or interviews in Japanese have also been translated into English by the author of this paper, unless otherwise stated. The graphic transcriptions presented in this paper have been produced by the author employing computerised spectrum analysis. The aim of this paper is to provide resources for further investigation into this topic, particularly for concerned researchers in other language regions than Japanese.

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.

The question of notation regarding electroacoustic music has appeared episodically along the course of its development. With the advent of digital techniques, now universally used, through the development of musicological studies of the field, and with the surge of interactive devices between computers and performers, the need for various forms of representing sounds and data has never been so strong.