Starting from a distinction between music creation and sound or pre-established methods of form and sound manipulation, this paper discusses the use of some typical procedures in computer-aided composition. A critique of common-sense procedures sets out to show that musical creativity may be threatened and put at risk in the name of a community's immediate acceptance of what is considered to be of musical value.

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.

Liubai (留白, literally ‘leaving blankness’) is a unique method of expression in Chinese classical paintings. The core spirit of the technique is inextricably linked to ancient Chinese Taoism and traditional aesthetics, which are prominently featured by simplicity and nationality. This article, taking the real-time interactive electroacoustic Chinese art song ‘Lang Tao Sha’ (浪淘沙), explores the use of the artistic technique of liubai from the perspective of a soprano singer by focusing on the three aspects of lyrics, vocal music and electroacoustic music creation, and singing performance.

Since mid-1999 I have been working on an expanded concept of musical space not only incorporating space according to its spatial characteristics in the narrow sense (acoustic, architectonic, sculptural, perspective and ambient). Beyond this my installation works conceive of space in its site-specificity, usually existing in several layers: a social layer, a historical-political layer and a situational layer. This concept of space is thus not limited to interior spaces and architectonic-formal relationships, a position which naturally also defines my working methods: only subjective, on-site research yields the theme and concept of an installation. I call such installations sound situations, following the ‘conscious creation of situations’ conceived by Guy Debord (International Situationists) in the 1950s. This means first that I open myself up to situations – usually in public spaces – in order to sense their site-specific tensions and to draw them out in all their possible relationships. Secondly, I alter these situations in order to make them more dense through intensification. The concept can be defined as articulating the space, the site; for this reason I prefer to work with site-specific acoustic and visual material found at the site, but also introduce foreign material when it serves to reinforce communication with the site and its occupants and visitors.

This article aims to bring to light the links between technology and aesthetics in the first electroacoustic pieces written between 1953 and 1966 by Karlheinz Stockhausen. After reviewing the technological differences of the two aesthetics of musique concrète (France) and elektronische Musik (Germany), it is possible to see how Stockhausen transcended this distinction by gradually creating more diversified material, leading to a ‘world material’, independent from the tools used. This comes along with a more global approach to the sound. The composer, by an appropriate use of the equipment, does not seek an individual control of each element or each parameter, but has a larger-scale view, in which time units are longer and are considered as a whole. This conception, while remaining as precise as an analytical approach, involves a rethinking of the time development, proposed by Stockhausen as the Momentform, a new musical form in which each part is independent and does not constitute the continuation of the preceding one. This reflection on non-linearity in a work, and on relative perception of time, is a key to understanding Stockhausen's music.

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.

This article reports on an interview-based study with ten sound artists and composers, all engaged in situated sonic practices. We propose that these artists engage the ear and shape possible interactions with the artwork by altering the relationship between sound, the space in which it is heard and the people who hear it. Our interviews probe the creative process and explore how a sound artist’s methods and tools might influence the reception of their work. A thematic analysis of interview transcriptions leads us to characterise artist processes as mediatory, in the sense that they act in between site and audience experience and are guided by the non-human agencies of settings and material things. We propose that artists transfer their own situated and embodied listening to that of the audience and develop sonic and staging devices to direct perceptual activity and listening attention. Our findings also highlight a number of engagement challenges, in particular the difficulty artists face in understanding their audience’s experience and the specificity of an artwork’s effect not just to its location but also to the disposition, abilities and prior experiences of listeners.

Since the 1980s, deconstruction has become a popular approach for designing architecture. In music, however, the term has not been absorbed as well by the related literature, with a few exceptions. In this article, ways to find ideological groundings for deconstructivism in music are introduced through the concepts of enchaînement and reconstruction paradoxes. Similar to the Banach–Tarski paradox in mathematics, reconstruction paradoxes occur when reconstructing the parts of a whole no longer yields the same properties as the whole. In music, a reconstruction paradox occurs when a piece constructed from tonal segments no longer yields a perceived tonality. Deconstruction in architecture heavily relies on computer-aided design (CAD) to realise complex ideas. Similarly in music, computer-aided composition (CAC) techniques such as neural networks, concatenative synthesis and automated orchestration are used. In this article, we discuss such tools in the context of this advocated new aesthetics: deconstructivist music.

This article counters the canonical histories of electronic music that traditionally begin with Cahill’s Telharmonium and find their historical centre in the activities of the Paris and Cologne studios of the mid-twentieth century. The concept of ‘failed histories’ is introduced here with three important examples. The first chronicles the career of electromusical innovator Johann Baptist Schalkenbach (1824–1910). The second example examines Britain’s earliest electronic sound performance in 1895, signalling a rupture between electromusical bombast and the detailed, quiet work of the experimental laboratory. The third episode looks at the wireless oscillation outrages of the 1920s and 1930s, where electronic tone prematurely trespassed upon musical culture. Taken together, these failed histories offer an alternative narrative of electronic music finding its voice (and losing its voice) in turn-of-the-century Britain.