This article examines differing approaches to the definition, classification and modelling of interactive music systems, drawing together both historical and contemporary practice. Concepts of shared control, collaboration and conversation metaphors, mapping, gestural control, system responsiveness and separation of interface from sound generator are discussed. The article explores the potential of interactive systems to facilitate the creation of dynamic compositional sonic architectures through performance and improvisation.

This article provides an overview of sound art, encompassing its history and artistic development, and the complexities of the term’s use as a categorisation. It starts with various definitions employed and the ways that recent museum exhibitions have left the genre’s parameters seemingly open-ended, as well as the problems to be faced in finding a ‘frame’ for sound in an exhibition setting. The article then lays out the roots of the form’s aesthetics, including the disjunction between sound and image afforded by the invention of recording, musique concrète, and spatialised composition through the centuries. Sound art’s relationships to the 60s art movement Earthworks, ambient music, sound by visual artists, architecture, sound sculpture, surveillance, sound design and sound ecology are explored to contextualise its significance not only to different disciplines within the arts to but sound’s place in contemporary society. At the conclusion, two recent works by D.A.M.A.G.E. and David Byrne, which loom somewhere in-between music and sound art, are considered in light of the increasingly fluid interpretation of sound art’s identity.

The ZKM|Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe is called Center because it is a museum and more than a museum. As a museum it has a classical museological function as a support and distribution system: Collection and archive, exhibitions and events. But in addition to it, the ZKM has two institutes for research, development and production (Institute for Music and Acoustics and Institute for Visual Media). The ZKM is a center for all media and for all art forms created in the 20th century. The machine based moving image has shifted the image from the classical position as space based art to time based art. Therefore the ZKM is the only museum of the world that integrated the mother of time based art, namely music, in his permanent collection and in its temporary exhibitions. This article describes the logic in the evolution of modern art, which is followed by the mission statement of the ZKM.

The overall concept for a Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie in Karlsruhe positioned music as integral part of it from the very beginning in 1985. The following text does not list accomplishments by discussing individual works, productions and research projects; this report describes and contextualises what happened and how it happened, it talks of people and concepts, of politics and ideas. It tries to illuminate the complex path between politics and technology, individual interests and cultural perspectives that led to and shaped ZKM. The uniqueness of ZKM is not only that it comprises museums as well as institutes, which actively produce art. The uniqneness of ZKM also lies in that music was planned as an equally important partner in the original concept, and that the Institute for Music and Acoustics still holds a major position in the institution today even though ZKM as a whole shifted towards the dominance of visual media. The focus of this text is on how the Institute for Music and Acoustics forms an integral part of ZKM as a whole while evolving its own inner direction and dynamics.

The article is a study on the literature of sound art from two languange areas, German and English. The text reveals two different discourses. The German texts on Klangkunst (sound art in German) focus upon the sound material’s relation to a spatial location where sound sculptures and installations are given central focus. These are genres that transcend the old divisions between spatial arts (Raumkunst) and the time-based arts (Zeitkunst). A strong emphasis on the dual aspect of seeing and hearing could be described as a central point of departure. Klangkunst concerns an investigation of both time and space, through ear and eye. In the English literature on sound art, there are often references to sound’s inner aesthetical qualities. The perspectives on sound’s relation to room is evident also here, but the perspectives are however broader, in the sense that the aspects of space and locality are diversified and pluralistic. One will find an even larger scope of literature and references if the area of sound art also includes cultural-studies perspectives on sound, sonic experiences and acoustic phenomena, the influx of new technologies on the everyday soundscape, and sound design. These are areas often referred to when speaking about the ‘sonic turn’. The way the term sound art is handled in English texts is often very vague. The German study of Klangkunst developed within the academic field of musicology. There has been a fruitful collaboration between musicologists, publishing houses, music journals, galleries, academic institutions and higher art education, which together has helped to establish Klangkunst as an artistic expression and theoretical discourse. This strong intellectual infrastructure has been important in the ‘construction’ of the concept Klangkunst. The two separate theoretical discourses not only deal with the concept of sound art differently. Although many of the artists are dealt with in both the English and the German literature, there are very seldom references to the German literature in the English texts. This tendency is not reciprocal.

In this paper we reflect on the performer–instrument relationship by turning towards the thinking practices of the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961). Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological idea of the body as being at the centre of the world highlights an embodied position in the world and bestows significance onto the body as a whole, onto the body as a lived body. In order to better understand this two-way relationship of instrument and performer, we introduce the notion of the performative layer, which emerges through strategies for dealing with discontinuities, breakdowns and the unexpected in network performance.

The use of a laptop computer for musical performance has become widespread in the electronic music community. It brings with it many issues pertaining to the communication of musical intent. Critics argue that performances of this nature fail to engage audiences because many performers use the mouse and/or computer keyboard to control their musical works, leaving no visual cues to guide the audience as to the correlation between performance gestures and musical outcomes. The author will argue that interfaces need to communicate something of their task and that cognitive affordances (Gibson 1979) associated with the performance interface become paramount if the musical outcomes are to be perceived as clearly tied to real-time performance gestures – in other words, that the audience are witnessing the creation of the music in that moment as distinct to the manipulation of pre-recorded or pre-sequenced events. Interfaces of his kind lend themselves particularly to electroacoustic and computer music performance where timbre, texture and morphology may be paramount.

This essay develops an ontology of sound and argues that sound art plays a crucial role in revealing this ontology. I argue for a conception of sound as a continuous, anonymous flux to which human expressions contribute but which precedes and exceeds these expressions. Developing Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s conception of the perceptual unconscious, I propose that this sonic flux is composed of two dimensions: a virtual dimension that I term ‘noise’ and an actual dimension that consists of contractions of this virtual continuum: for example, music and speech. Examining work by Max Neuhaus, Chris Kubick, Francisco Lopez and others, I suggest that the richest works of sound art help to disclose the virtual dimension of sound and its process of actualisation.

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.

Composers, musicians and computer scientists have begun to use software-based agents to create music and sound art in both linear and non-linear (non-predetermined form and/or content) idioms, with some robust approaches now drawing on various disciplines. This paper surveys recent work: agent technology is first introduced, a theoretical framework for its use in creating music/sound art works put forward, and an overview of common approaches then given. Identifying areas of neglect in recent research, a possible direction for further work is then briefly explored. Finally, a vision for a new hybrid model that integrates non-linear, generative, conversational and affective perspectives on interactivity is proposed.

This paper addresses some aspects related to the use of sound to create referential and representational discourses in sound art. We concentrate on the particular use of sound in this repertoire whose delimitation is still increasing among practitioners. As a relatively new art genre it oscillates between aesthetical and organisational strategies that are commonly found in the domain of both music and visual arts. At the same time, it resists being fully incorporated by these two domains as it develops a discourse that is very specific to its own. To analyse these relations we focus on two fundamental aspects for the study of sound art: space and time. The sound art repertoire approaches these two aspects in a very particular way, placing them at the core of its creative process and establishing connections with conceptual and referential aspects that are put in evidence by sound. We will concentrate on two different points of view: on one side, we analyse how sounds can build temporal discourses that become attached to specific spaces; on the other side, we consider the use of a space that emerges from contextual connections triggered by sounds.

The ZKM | Karlsruhe has been producing work now for 20 years. The Institute for Music and Acoustics in particular has commissioned, produced or co-produced approximately 400 works in this time. The Institute’s work takes place within a very active but also very complex environment in Germany, one which often repudiates the use of technology and its accompanying shift in the aesthetic paradigm. The following text will shed light on the work of the ZKM | Karlsruhe in general and the various activities of the Institute for Music and Acoustics (IMA) in particular. These activities encompass the areas of production, presentation, publication and research. To this end, the article will touch upon the IMA’s primary research projects, in particular the archiving project Mediaartbase (Brümmer, Heidenreich, Haecker et al. 2009), the development of software and hardware in the context of spatial music, and a number of interface developments. Reasons will be discussed that substantiate the significance of spatial music with regard to the reception of music in the future, and the role of new interfaces in future musical activities will be described.

The commercially available field recordings of Francisco López and Toshiya Tsunoda are difficult to classify. These field recordings are not site specific in the conventional sense because they are not tied to a particular architectural or listening space. Nor can field recordings be categorised as just another subgenre of experimental electronic music. Whereas in musique concrète and acousmatic music, sounds are organised according to musical or thematic parameters, López’s and Tsunoda’s field recording sounds are subjected to minimal editing and processing, and are organised according to the innate traits of the sounds themselves.

It would be insufficient, however, to offer the usual conciliatory conclusion that López’s and Tsunoda’s recordings straddle the sound art/music divide by possessing qualities of both. This article argues that these field recordings can best be understood in relation to the visual arts concept of objecthood, Michael Fried’s term for deciphering minimalist sculpture of the late 1960s. Objecthood explains how these field recordings use appropriated sounds that are nonetheless treated as non-referential, autonomous materials. This strategy posits its own type of site specificity that purports to be acultural and ahistorical, yet is nevertheless steeped in culture and history.

Zirkonium is a flexible, non-invasive, open-source program for sound spatialisation over spherical (dome-shaped) loudspeaker setups. By non-invasive, we mean that Zirkonium offers the artist spatialisation capabilities without forcing her to change her usual way of working. This is achieved by supporting a variety of means of designing and controlling spatialisations. Zikonium accommodates user-defined speaker distributions and offers HRTF-based headphone simulation for situations when the actual speaker setup is not available. It can acquire sound sources from files, live input, or via the so-called device mode, which allows Zirkonium to appear to other programs as an audio interface. Control data may be predefined and stored in a file or generated elsewhere and sent over OSC. This paper details Zirkonium, its design philosophy and implementation, and how we have been using it since 2005.

This paper explores the differences in the design and performance of acoustic and new digital musical instruments, arguing that with the latter there is an increased encapsulation of musical theory. The point of departure is the phenomenology of musical instruments, which leads to the exploration of designed artefacts as extensions of human cognition – as scaffolding onto which we delegate parts of our cognitive processes. The paper succinctly emphasises the pronounced epistemic dimension of digital instruments when compared to acoustic instruments. Through the analysis of material epistemologies it is possible to describe the digital instrument as an epistemic tool: a designed tool with such a high degree of symbolic pertinence that it becomes a system of knowledge and thinking in its own terms. In conclusion, the paper rounds up the phenomenological and epistemological arguments, and points at issues in the design of digital musical instruments that are germane due to their strong aesthetic implications for musical culture.

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.

Urban Portrait: Thessaloniki is a sonic art installation by this author, presented at the Lansdown Centre for Electronic Arts of Middlesex University, London, in May 2008. This article constitutes an exploration of sonic representation of the experience of place as a central element of the work. The term psychosonography is introduced to encapsulate the described method and references to its supporting concepts. Urban Portrait is about representation of experienced locality, as well as the emergence of relationships among a collection of such localities through their sonic embodiments. Ultimately, it takes the form of the sonic equivalent of a psychogeographical map, to be navigated by aural means.