In 1989, after ten years of research, François Delalande presented for the first time the idea of ‘listening behaviours’, distinguishing several ways to listen to the same piece of music. The methods did not allow for many conclusions, but the approach started a new field of research, where diverse listening behaviours could serve as a basis for diverse, exclusive (or even contradictory) analyses of the same work. Furthermore, Delalande’s preliminary research based on an extract from Pierre Henry’s music is still one of the few instances of research into acousmatic music listening that addresses actual listeners. The last 20 years have seen the reproduction and extension of Delalande’s results, as well as a growing interest in listening in musicological circles. For this reason, it seemed necessary to review research about listening behaviours to evaluate their operational validity and to propose a robust theoretical framework for their study and description. This paper addresses this problem using the elicitation interview for the description and interpretation of listeners’ testimonies. Drawing on testimonies from five listeners about a single extract of acousmatic music, it seems that, for Delalande’s model to be able to describe various listening experiences, it should be further detailed and completed with attention management processes. Further investigation is needed to allow the model to include some listening behaviours which were not recurrent enough here to make sense of them.

This article reflects on a number of issues surrounding the appropriation of culturally identifiable sound material for artistic purposes – both overall or broader concerns and those that may arise particularly in conjunction with electroacoustic musical composition. More specifically, we explore questions potentially raised by three electroacoustic compositions recently commissioned by the Instruments INDIA project, a unique cultural partnership between Liverpool Hope University (represented by Dr Manuella Blackburn) and Milapfest (represented by Alok Nayak). Those three compositions were created exclusively with materials from an extensive library of Indian music performances, curated and recorded by Blackburn specifically for Instruments INDIA, and premiered in concert in Liverpool, UK, 20 January 2017. Following the broader discussion of relevant concerns, we briefly review some perspectives offered by the three composers (one of whom is the author), as they relate to cultural appropriation in general, and working with the Instruments INDIA sound library in particular.

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 will outline the experience of researchers at De Montfort University (DMU) (Leicester, UK) in devising and delivering workshops on sound-based creativity (sbc). These workshops supported and guided participants through the process of listening training, recording and composing their own sound-based pieces. As well as engaging participants in sound-based composition, the aim of these workshops was to introduce them to examples from the repertoire of sbm. The final workshops involved the collection of Intention/Reception (I/R) data from participants in response to a piece of sbm. Nearly 180 participants from a diverse range of ages and backgrounds took part in the workshops and the data indicate that engagement with sbm was high. This article will provide the context for the project, describe the methodology and analyse and evaluate the data that were collected. Finally, the implications for future work will be discussed.

One of Pierre Schaeffer’s achievements in his musical research was his proposal of the sound object as a basic unit of musical experience and his insistence on listening as a main focus of research. Out of this research grew a radical new music theory of sound-based composition. This article will draw on this extensive research to explore the spaces where this music is heard and present the claim that the space in which music is experienced is as much a part of the music as the timbral material itself. The key question here is the changes made to timbral material through acousmatic spatial listening and the subjective analysis affordance of the listeners’ placement and perspective. These consequences are studied from a phenomenological and psychoacoustic perspective and it is suggested that Schaeffer’s research on timbral and musical concepts can be extended to include spatial features.

In this article, based on four decades of experience of using samples in diverse ways in experimental, particularly electroacoustic compositions, the author investigates the world of what he calls ‘sample-based sound-based music’ and suggests that there is a relative lack of scholarship in this important area. The article’s contextual sections focus on briefly delineating this world of sonic creativity and placing it within today’s sampling culture as well as dealing with two political aspects of sampling, a musician’s attitude towards the reuse of sonic materials and the legality of sampled sounds, including musical passages, in the discussion of which current legislation related to sampling is challenged. Following this, a number of categories are presented in terms of the types of sampling material that is being used as well as how sample-based works are presented. The subsequent section is perhaps the most poignant in the article, namely the opening up of this form of innovative composition from a more traditional ‘artist creates work’ mode of operation to a more collaborative one which is essentially already part of most other forms of sampling culture. The objective here is to suggest that such collaborative approaches will enable sample-based sound-based music to become part of the lives of a much broader group than those currently involved with it.

This article specifically addresses electroacoustic music compositions that borrow from existing musical and sound resources. Investigating works that borrow and thrive upon existing sound sources presents an array of issues regarding terminology, authorship and creativity. Embedding borrowed elements into new electroacoustic music goes beyond the simplicity of ‘cut and paste’ as composers approach this practice with new and novel techniques. Musical borrowings have been widely studied in fields of popular and classical music, from cover songs to quotations and from pastiches to theme and variations; however, borrowings that take place within the field of electroacoustic music can be less clear or defined, and demand a closer look. Because the components and building blocks of electroacoustic music are often recorded sound, the categories of borrowing become vast; thus incidences of borrowing, in some shape or form, can appear inevitable or unavoidable when composing. The author takes on this issue and proposes a new framework for categorising borrowings as a helpful aid for others looking to sample in new compositional work, as well as for further musicological study. The article will consider the compositional process of integration and reworking of borrowed material, using a repertoire study to showcase the variety of techniques in play when sound materials change hands, composer to composer. Terminology already in use by others to describe sound borrowing in electroacoustic music will be investigated in an effort to show the multitude of considerations and components in action when borrowing takes place. Motivations for borrowing, borrowing types, borrowing durations, copying as imitation, and composers’ reflections upon borrowing will all be considered within the article, along with discussions on programmatic development and embedding techniques. At the heart of this article, the author aims to show how widespread and pervasive borrowing is within the electroacoustic repertoire by drawing attention to varieties of sound transplants, all considered as acts of borrowing.

This article explores recent theories of listening, perception and embodiment, including those by Mark Grimshaw and Tom Garner, Salomé Voegelin, and Eric Clarke, as well as consequences and possibilities arising from them in relation to field recording and soundscape art practice. These theories of listening propose auditory perception as an embodied process of engaging with and understanding lived environment. Such phenomenological listening is understood as a relational engagement with the world in motion, as movement and change, which grants access to the listener’s emerging presence, agency and place in the world. Such ideas on listening have developed concurrently with new approaches to making and presenting field recordings, with a focus on developing phonographic methods for capturing and presenting the recordist’s embodied auditory perspective. In the present study, ‘first-person’ field recording is defined as both method and culturally significant material whereby a single recordist carries, wears or remains present with a microphone, consciously and reflexively documenting their personal listening encounters. This article examines the practice of first-person field recording and considers its specific applications in a range of sound art and soundscape art examples, including work by Gabi Losoncy, Graham Lambkin, Christopher Delaurenti and Klaysstarr (the author). In the examination of these methods and works, first-person field recording is considered as a means of capturing the proximate auditory space of the recordist as a mediated ‘point of ear’, which may be embodied, inhabited, and listened through by a subsequent listener. The article concludes with a brief summary of the discussion before some closing thoughts on recording, listening and the field, on field recording as practice-research and on potential connections with other fields in which the production of virtual environments is a key focus.

With the invention of UPIC by Iannis Xenakis in 1977, for the first time one could achieve the sonic realisation of drawn musical ideas by a computer. Since then, no one seems to have proposed an equivalent tool, providing usability for both beginners and professionals. We will discuss how lively the UPIC idea can still be today, and why we should pay attention to this approach. Indeed, there has been a relative quietness in the domain of computer music specifically regarding how we arrange graphical curves to describe the evolution of sound parameters and create a musical form. This ascertainment led to the birth of our project UPISketch, which aims at the same goal, using today’s technology. We hope that this first version can reintroduce the concept of a ‘computer-assisted tool for sound composition, assisted by drawing’ to a global audience. The program being available since June 2018, we will evaluate the results of the first workshops with various publics and take a glimpse at the next developments.

Reproduction (playback) is responsible for the presentation of the full spectrum of sound character captured during the recording process. The control of this and the faithfulness to an original sound has informed modern sound aesthetics. Current modes of reproduction, such as streaming, see the listener more interested in an approximate presentation of sound, rather than a broad and more psychoacoustically pleasing one. In the sonic arts, the practice of sound recycling and its associated methodologies, reproduction is re-contextualised, involving material that is borrowed, reworked and often disconnected from its source. Such issues are considered in this article through the examination of sound recycling in 94 diskont (1995), an album produced by the German act Oval. By studying the use of material and medium in the work, an attempt is made to discuss approaches to sound recycling through conceptual frameworks proposed by Bregman, Deleuze, Guattari and Smalley to provide a forum towards the interpretation of sound recycling in wider sonic arts practices.

Pipe organs are complex timbral synthesisers in an early acousmatic setting, which have always accompanied the evolution of music and technology. The most recent development is digital augmentation: the organ sound is captured, transformed and then played back in real time. The present augmented organ project relies on three main aesthetic principles: microphony, fusion and instrumentality. Microphony means that sounds are captured inside the organ case, close to the pipes. Real-time audio effects are then applied to the internal sounds before they are played back over loudspeakers; the transformed sounds interact with the original sounds of the pipe organ. The fusion principle exploits the blending effect of the acoustic space surrounding the instrument; the room response transforms the sounds of many single-sound sources into a consistent and organ-typical soundscape at the listener’s position. The instrumentality principle restricts electroacoustic processing to organ sounds only, excluding non-organ sound sources or samples. This article proposes a taxonomy of musical effects. It discusses aesthetic questions concerning the perceptual fusion of acoustic and electronic sources. Both extended playing techniques and digital audio can create musical gestures that conjoin the heterogeneous sonic worlds of pipe organs and electronics. This results in a paradoxical listening experience of unity in the diversity: the music is at the same time electroacoustic and instrumental.

The diverse practice of soundwalking is approached through its constituent parts (walking and listening) as an ideal ‘way in’ to the appreciation of new sonic art. It is argued that, because it engages the subject in a manner that encourages an aural perception of the environment not only as a physical space but also as a space of social and political tensions, divisions and flows, it can act as an experiential foundation for understanding how sound inflects our thoughts about and our relationships to agencies, human or not, that we interact with. This in turn renders possible modes of listening that are particularly adapted to contemporary forms of sonic art. Furthermore, soundwalking ties in to important contemporary discussions about participation, its potential for radical engagement of audiences and also the various forms of mediation it involves.

This article outlines a systematic process for developing the different knowledge domains required for teaching sound-based (electroacoustic) music as a new subject area. As a new area within the discipline of music, teachers are novices to the field. This requires epistemological deconstruction of what knowledge teachers need in this new field. Then the analysis outlines how to develop teachers’ new knowledge, which can be constructed as subject content knowledge (SCK), pedagogic content knowledge (PCK) and technology pedagogic content knowledge (TPACK). This epistemological analysis informed our creation of teaching materials that develop these different knowledge domains and take account of the complex interplay between them. This process was demonstrated through the ElectroAcoustic Resource Site Projects, which first built subject content knowledge and then created teacher’s packs to build pedagogic content knowledge, and a bespoke CPD programme, which embedded their inter-relationships and built technology pedagogic content knowledge. Most importantly, creating the teacher’s packs employed a user-centred design approach, putting teachers and pupils in the centre of the development process, thereby giving them voice. Voice is an integral part of empowerment in our model, which disrupts the hegemonic grip of the academic curriculum dominated by the traditional music canon. This article adds to the knowledge-base regarding how to develop the different domains required for teaching a new subject. We argue that sound-based music is accessible to all teachers and learners, thereby increasing inclusivity. This in turn can radically disrupt ways of teaching music in schools and the model created provides the necessary scaffolding for a paradigm shift in music teaching on an international level.

The medium and genre of the mixtape, a form dependent upon borrowed, repurposed and re-contextualised sonic material, has recently re-emerged as a vital component of contemporary commercial and creative music culture. This article suggests that analysis of the mixtape’s history and ethos can provide useful insight into ongoing tensions between cultures of active and passive listening, questions of ownership with regard to recorded sound and between the roles of producer and consumer within contemporary audio culture. It also proposes, via reference to relevant contemporary works, that the mixtape may now be considered a vital hybrid creative form, part composition/part compilation, with which composers, producers and sonic artists may actively engage. It historically and culturally contextualises this form, placing it within a lineage of military, political, creative and commercial conflict, which, among recorded sound technologies, is unique to tape and shows that the mixtape may be seen as an expression or utilisation of these factors. Consistent commercial and industrial efforts to suppress tape’s subversive qualities are outlined as are creative methodologies which have been adopted to resist such efforts. Contemporary music industry strategies to channel and commodify the aura and ethos of the mixtape as forerunner of the curated playlists vital to its current business model are detailed and contemporary cassette culture is considered as an alternative inheritor of the mixtape’s legacy and as alternative model for future musical creation and distribution. Finally, a set of characteristics which distinguish the mixtape as a creative form are identified and their potential application and implications are discussed.

An ongoing international arts-research-industry collaborative project focusing on the design and implementation of innovative car alarm systems, alarm/will/sound has a firm theoretical basis in theories of sound perception and classification of Pierre Schaeffer and the acousmatic tradition. In turn, the timbre perception, modelling and design components of this project have had a significant influence on a range of fixed media, electroacoustic and media installation works realised in parallel to the experimental research. An examination of the multiple points of contact and cross-influence between auditory warning research and artistic practice forms the backbone of this article, with an eye towards continued development in both the research and the artistic domains of the project.

In discourse on the topic, the question of what constitutes a musical ‘borrowing’, if raised at all, is usually restricted in scope and framed as one of terminology – that is, of determining the right term to characterise a particular borrowing act. In this way has arisen a welter of terms that, however expressive of nuance, have precluded evaluation of the phenomenon as such. This is in part a consequence of general disregard for the fact that to conceive of musical borrowing entails correlative concepts, all of which precondition it, yet none self-evidently. Further preclusive of clarity, the musico-analytic lens of borrowing is typically invoked only in counterpoint to a quintessentially Western aesthetic category of composition ex nihilo. As a consequence, the fundamental role played by borrowing in musical domains situated at the periphery of the Western art music tradition, specifically pre-modern polyphony and twentieth-century musique concrète, has been overlooked. This article seeks to bridge such lacunae in our understanding of musical borrowing via phenomenological investigation into its conceptual and historical foundations. A more comprehensive evaluation of musical borrowing, one capable of accounting for its diverse instantiations while simultaneously disclosing what makes all of them ‘borrowings’ in the first place, is thereby attainable.

In this article, I consider implications of outreach practices in the field of contemporary music for the field itself and for the professional artists involved. I am interested in what happens if we facilitate access to contemporary music for audiences of any kind of demographic, break down barriers, share authority between participating non-professionals and professional artists and allow all participants of a project influence on jointly created artworks. I investigate in how far the organisational or structural change in the creative practice and the creative outcome – that comes along with bringing new players into the field – has consequences on the personal practice of the professional actors in such a project. I base my article on theories of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, communication scholar Henry Jenkins, art historian Claire Bishop, musicologist Elena Ungeheuer and my own research into social structures of the contemporary art field, and apply them to a single case study: the artistic research project TransCoding – From ‘Highbrow Art’ to Participatory Culture, funded by the Austrian Science Fund. Using the method of thick description, I take the reader through the history of TransCoding, give account of field experiences and put the found patterns of cultural-social experiences into a theoretical context. I investigate the power shifts from professional artists to audience that occurred on the basis of creative, participatory processes within this project. In doing so, I would like to raise questions and stimulate discussion with regard to the conditions and social organisations of creative practice in the contemporary music field, the distribution of power and how this is felt when ‘bringing new audiences to new music’ into the core practice of professional artists, the actual creation of a new work.