This article investigates the approaches and attributes of publicly situated sound installations which have achieved the status of permanency, and have attracted ongoing local, and even international, visitors. The article draws on international fieldwork in 2015 that documented several enduring sound installations in the United States, UK and Europe. Through an inductive process including listening exercises, sound recordings, observations and interviews, the analysis identifies three approaches to creating sound installations and ten attributes of operative sound installations. It is argued that by encouraging public listening, the discussed sound installations successfully establish a sensory connection between people and their environments. By extension, it is argued that this emergent sense of place is commensurate with the installations’ capacity to augment a pre-existing ‘spirit of place’. These findings culminate in a sonic placemaking tool for situating sound art installations in urban spaces. It is suggested that urban planners and designers can apply the presented sonic placemaking tool to augment a site’s spirit of place, thereby affecting new experiences in everyday urban life.

This article presents a theoretical framework for the design of expressive musical instruments, the Musical Interface Technology Design Space: MITDS. The activities of imagining, designing and building new musical instruments, performing, composing, and improvising with them, and analysing the whole process in an effort to better understand the interface, our physical and cognitive associations with it, and the relationship between performer, instrument and audience can only be seen as an ongoing iterative work-in-progress. It is long-term evolutionary research, as each generation of a new musical instrument requires inventiveness and years of dedication towards the practice and mastery of its performance system (comprising the interface, synthesis and the mappings between them). Many revisions of the system may be required in order to develop musical interface technologies that enable us to achieve truly expressive performances. The MITDS provides a conceptual framework for describing, analysing, designing and extending the interfaces, mappings, synthesis algorithms and performance techniques for interactive musical instruments. It provides designers with a theoretical base to draw upon when creating technologically advanced performance systems, and can be seen as a set of guidelines for analysis, and a taxonomy of design patterns for interactivity in musical instruments. The MITDS focuses mainly on human-centred design approaches to realtime control of the multidimensional parameter spaces in musical composition and performance, where the primary objective is to close the gap between human gestures and complex synthesis methods.

The years since the turn of the millennium have seen an increasing number of sound artists engaging with contemporary environmental issues such as biodiversity loss, sustainability and climate change through their work, forming a growing movement of environmentally concerned sound art; however, their work has yet to achieve the recognition enjoyed by comparable environmentalist practices in almost every other art form. This article argues that this increasingly significant area of sound arts practice should be recognised as a distinct field in its own right, and proposes that it be termed ‘ecological sound art’, reflecting its equivalent in the visual arts. After establishing its current absence from both ecocritical and sound arts scholarship, it proceeds to outline some of the core approaches which characterise works of ecological sound art, as the first step towards its establishment as a coherent field of practice. The final section draws from key works of contemporary ecological theory, examining the fundamental accord that exists between the new modes of thought they propose and the ways in which we experience and relate to sound art, demonstrating that ecological sound art represents not only a significant new field of sound arts practice, but also a powerful ecological art form.

It is widely accepted that acoustic and digital musical instruments shape the cognitive processes of the performer on both embodied and conceptual levels, ultimately influencing the structure and aesthetics of the resulting performance. In this article we examine the ways in which computer music languages might similarly influence the aesthetic decisions of the digital music practitioner, even when those languages are designed for generality and theoretically capable of implementing any sound-producing process. We examine the basis for querying the non-neutrality of tools with a particular focus on the concept of idiomaticity: patterns of instruments or languages which are particularly easy or natural to execute in comparison to others. We then present correspondence with the developers of several major music programming languages and a survey of digital musical instrument creators examining the relationship between idiomatic patterns of the language and the characteristics of the resulting instruments and pieces. In an open-ended creative domain, asserting causal relationships is difficult and potentially inappropriate, but we find a complex interplay between language, instrument, piece and performance that suggests that the creator of the music programming language should be considered one party to a creative conversation that occurs each time a new instrument is designed.

Listeners experience electroacoustic music as full of significance and meaning, and they experience spatiality as one of the factors contributing to its meaningfulness. If we want to understand spatiality in electroacoustic music, we must understand how the listener’s mental processes give rise to the experience of meaning. In electroacoustic music as in everyday life, these mental processes unite the peripheral auditory system with human spatial cognition. In the discussion that follows we consider a range of the listener’s mental processes relating space and meaning from the perceptual attributes of spatial imagery to the spatial reference frames for places and navigation. When considering multichannel loudspeaker systems in particular, an important part of the discussion is focused on the distinctive and idiomatic ways in which this particular mode of sound production contributes to and situates meaning. These include the phenomenon of image dispersion, the important consequences of the precedence effect and the influence of source characteristics on spatial imagery. These are discussed in close relation to the practicalities of artistic practice and to the potential for artistic meaning experienced by the listener.

Sonification is described as an under-utilised dimension of the ‘wow!’ factor in science engagement multi-media. It is suggested that sonification's potential value, like much of the scientific visualisation content, probably lies less in hard facts and more in how it may serve as a stimulant for curiosity. Sound is described as a multi-dimensional phenomenon, and a number of approaches to creating sonifications are reviewed. Design strategies are described for five types of phenomena that were sonified for works created by cosmologist George Smoot III and percussionist/ethnomusicologist Mickey Hart, most particularly for their film Rhythms of the Universe (Hart and Smoot 2013).

This article is intended to raise some points of interest and mark out some pointers for alternative approaches to the design and execution of interactive music systems and artworks which pursue interaction that:

[bull ] does not include any pre-defined pathways,

[bull ] takes dynamic morphology as its foundation, and

[bull ] implements dynamic software infrastructures, built on the object-oriented model, providing dynamic instrument instantiation, orchestration and timbral control.

It is intended that such design would be a precursor to a new approach to interactivity that responds more directly and uniquely to those who engage in the work, and in so doing rewards them more richly for their time, energy and enthusiasm.

The key question posed here is how listeners experience meaning when listening to electroacoustic music, especially how they experience it as art. This question is addressed by connecting electroacoustic listening with the ways that the mind constructs meaning in everyday life. Initially, the topic of the everyday mind provides a framework for discussing cognitive schemas, mental spaces, the Event schema and auditory gist. Then, specific idioms of electroacoustic music that give rise to artistic meaning are examined. These include the creative binding of circumstances with events and the conceptual blending that creates metaphorical meaning. Finally, the listener’s experience of long-term events is discussed is relation to the location event-structure metaphor.

This paper seeks to examine how sound in general (and electroacoustic music in particular) can evoke a sense of being and place which may be strongly related to our visual experience. The auditory system has evolved to seek the reasons for the soundfield it encounters and this property cannot meaningfully be ignored by composers in this medium. The acousmatic condition stimulates and enhances this response. The science of acoustics cannot any longer alone explain sound phenomena and requires psychological and ecological dimensions. The idea of the ‘frame’ is developed from large-scale to small-scale soundfields: ‘landscape’, ‘arena’ and ‘stage’ are seen to be flexible components of this approach to composition. The paper concludes that a mature relationship of audio and visual art forms requires a greater acknowledgement of these attributes of sound.

This paper outlines a way forward for an anthropologically inclined electroacoustic music. Considering the similarities in methodological approaches between the fields of ethnography and soundscape composition, this paper proposes to further the use of contextual information when making compositional decisions with sound materials derived from field recordings: a socio-sonic methodology. To begin the discussion, theoretical readings of sound in context are presented. Parallels are highlighted between the practices of ethnographic study and soundscape composition, illustrated with the work of Steve Feld and the World Soundscape Project. A brief consideration of the soundscape–acousmatic continuum with reference to works by Luc Ferrari, Denis Smalley and Hildegard Westerkamp is followed by a combined summation of ethnographic, soundscape and acousmatic approaches to outline a socio-sonic methodology for composition. Examples of work by Peter Cusack, Justin Bennett and Bob Ostertag are discussed alongside my own work Manifest – a fixed-media composition based on field recordings and interviews made at political protests in Barcelona. The potential is for a music considered equally for its sonic and socio-political properties.

A computer-assisted composition tool for investigating the application of evolutionary techniques in the composition of music is presented. The nature of such an application is examined in terms of defining the possible mechanisms that provide a means for automated creativity. These mechanisms take inspiration from processes found in Darwinian-based evolution theory, genetic algorithm theory and similar aesthetically based uses of a genetic search heuristic in the visual arts. A formal model of ‘musical evolution’ is proposed, with particular emphasis placed on the ways in which a genetic algorithm can be used to effectively manipulate a variety of compositional structures within a hierarchical and generative grammar-based model of musical composition. The result is a prototype Windows MIDI application called GeNotator that allows composers to experiment with a range of musical structures by interactively ‘evolving’ them through a familiar and comprehensive graphical user interface.

In this text, the author argues that space should be considered as important a musical parameter in acousmatic music composition as more conventional musical parameters in instrumental music. There are aspects of sound spatialisation that can be considered exclusive to the acousmatic language: for example, immersive spatialisation places listeners in an environment where they are surrounded by speakers. The author traces a history of immersive spatialisation techniques, and describes the tools available today and the research needed to develop this parameter in the future. The author presents his own cycle of works within which he has developed a new way to compose for a spatial parameter. He calls this technique timbre spatialisation.

The author's close connection to traditional Alaskan culture has inspired the creation and implementation of new multimedia instruments based on the use of ritual objects in shamanic cultures of the far north. Simultaneously, the musical processes articulated by this music are structurally tied to environmental systems in a technique discussed here as ‘ecoacoustics’. In this work, performer/composer interaction, musical composition theory, multimedia performance, and musical instrument design have been transformed in response to these influences.

Spatial elements in acousmatic music are inherent to the art form, in composition and in the projection of the music to the listener. But is it possible for spatial elements to be as important carriers of musical structure as the other aspects of sound? For a parameter to serve the requirements of musical development, it is necessary for that parameter to cover a range of perceptually different states. For ‘space’ to be more than a setting within which the main active elements in the structure unfold, it needs to satisfy these requirements. This paper explains a number of important spatial composition strategies available to the acousmatic composer in light of current technology and sound reproduction situations. The analysis takes an aesthetical rather than a technical standpoint.

In the majority of discussions surrounding the design of digital instruments and real-time performance systems, notions such as control and mapping are seen from a classical systems point of view: the former is often seen as a variable from an input device or perhaps some driving signal, while the latter is considered as the liaison between input and output parameters. At the same time there is a large body of research regarding gesture in performance that is concerned with the expressive and communicative nature of musical performance. While these views are certainly central to a conceptual understanding of ‘instrument’, it can be limiting to consider them a priori as the only proper model, and to mediate one’s conception of digital instrument design by fixed notions of control, mapping and gesture. As an example of an alternative way to view instrumental response, control structuring and mapping design, this paper discusses the concept of gesture from the point of view of the perception of human intentionality in sound and how one might consider this in interaction design.

This article approaches the definition of the important term 'acousmatic' by reference to its origins in the sound studios of the French National Radio. The links from France to Québec are outlined and the Québecois acousmatic school, largely based in Montreal, is introduced. Aspects of a typical piece are discussed, and the author is able to answer the title question positively.

This article describes a project intended to promote access to electroacoustic music for children and teenagers aged 6 to 15 years in a socially and educationally disadvantaged rural community in Michoacán, Mexico. It explores an educational model of teaching, learning and creation of electroacoustic music through the use of music technology and pedagogy based on constructivism and Paulo Freire’s ideas on education as a practice of freedom. It provides a pedagogical reflection on the processes of learning and appreciation of this new music. The project includes the use of an interactive music system – implemented in MaxMSP using a mobile phone OSC app to control space and its interaction with timbre, pitch and duration – as an aid in the classroom and its implementation in an educational programme with a social impact. The research covered in this article could be taken into account to deliver new music education in rural communities with similar socioeconomic circumstances.

This article discusses the affordances of soundscape composition and how the techniques and approaches of this genre have been embraced as an inter-disciplinary research methodology. Since its emergence from the World Soundscape Project, the concept of soundscape composition has set out to enhance our listening awareness of our soundscapes, inspiring and establishing a discourse that explores a sense of place through sound. Soundscape composition over the past decades has established itself as a popular compositional practice among acousmatic composers utilising compositional techniques that go beyond phonographic representation of acoustic environments. Electroacoustic techniques explore not only the transformation and processing of field recordings but also the spatialisation and performance techniques used to create immersive and realistic soundscapes. These compositional developments since the establishment of the World Soundscape Project have brought this genre of music to a wider audience as it has developed into a cross-disciplinary practice. Soundscape studies methodologies such as soundwalking, listening and recording are being utilised by a broader research cohort outside of soundscape composition. This article provides a survey of recent projects and compositions that incorporate a soundscape and cross-disciplinary approach that reflects a variety of cultural themes and issues within the disciplines of social, political and cultural science.

In this paper, the authors describe and discuss UrbanRemix, a platform consisting of mobile-device applications and web-based tools to facilitate collaborative field recording, sound exploration, and soundscape creation. Reflecting on its use at workshops, festivals and community events, they evaluate the project in terms of its ability to enable participants to engage with their aural environments and to uncover their own creativity in the process.

Among the questions regularly put to me, those that recur most often touch upon three aspects, three things to consider that are, truth to tell, unending within the domain of organised sounds. Those questions that take the lead are usually concerned with space – the representation of space as well as the production of space. Then come those that deal with listening, active or passive. Last are those relating to tools for making and for listening. Together, these approaches run through the stages that are very natural in position problematics: where, when, how, for whom, why? I would like, in formulating these repeated questions once more, to make myself re-orientate them in such a way to show that by bringing to bear forty years of experience, I have tried to reply to them as much through practice as through theory, putting forward the idea of a family of operational concepts linked together through the perceptual radical ‘acous’: acousmatic, acousmonium, acousmographe, acousmathèque.