This article deals with two of my works, both of which were composed to literary texts in Arabic. The first is one of my shortest compositions and the second is one of the longest. The Gown of Night (1988), for magnetic tape, is based on the voices of Bedouin children articulating a text by Muhammad Ghana’im (Israel) and lasts 2 minutes and 42 seconds. Like Two Branches (1989), a cantata for chamber choir, two oboes, kanun (or piano), violoncello and a set of supplemented tar drums, is based on text by Al-Khansa – who lived in the Arabian Peninsula in the sixth century AD – and lasts 42 minutes. The ongoing process involving the composition of these two works in the late 1980s resulted in their successive appearance in 1988 and 1990.

In multimedia art and communication, sound models are needed which are versatile, responsive to users’ expectations, and have high audio quality. Moreover, model flexibility for human-machine interaction is a major issue. Models based on the physics of actual or virtual objects can meet all of these requirements, thus allowing the user to rely on high-level descriptions of the sounding entities. As long as the sound description is based on the physics of sounding objects and not only on the characteristics of human hearing, an integration with physics-based graphic models becomes possible.

Complete Listings for Volume 3

Let us imagine a situation: a listener seated in a concert hall witnesses a performance by a trumpet player (standing on the stage) of a sequence of four quarter-notes, with the pitches of B[flat ]3–A3–C4–B3. The listener chooses to ignore the immediate physical surroundings and hears one of the following: (i) four trumpet sounds equally spaced in time, (ii) a sequence of intervals – minor second, minor third, minor second, (iii) an instance of set 4-1, (iv) a motive referring to the name of BACH. The `web of interpretants' (term from Nattiez 1987/1990) surrounding a simple musical fact is already quite dense, even though we have only considered its aspects relating to pitch, pitch class and pitch notation (representation by letters). What if the performer's gestures, the facial expressions, the direction of the bell of the instrument became important? Might one say, then, that the music has become theatre?

The MUSIC N-family of sound compilers offers a flexible but complex set of tools for computer music composition. These packages are, in a general sense, difficult to grasp by the beginner. Their design is also based on an outdated paradigm of scores and orchestras. New alternatives to such systems are a current necessity. This paper presents the software Audio Workshop as a proposed design for a sound synthesis and processing system. This program has been developed for the Win32 platform, offering many synthesis and processing options in a simpler and intuitive way. The paper describes the elements of the program and discusses its design and applications.

This article describes some of the basic principles of acoustics and psychoacoustics related to the spatialisation of sound. It introduces recording and diffusion technologies, including binaural, stereo and surround-sound techniques.

The annual Organised Sound CD will contain the following pieces and musical examples from Volume 3, Number 1: