This article is the final stage of seven years of research dedicated to understanding the theoretical backgrounds of Brazilian electroacoustic music in which a significant amount of data was gathered from a series of questionnaires and interviews with Brazilian composers. Our research focuses mainly on the influence of what we have called the historical matrices: musique concrète, elektronische musik and computer music. We were able to determine to some extent how much each of these matrices weigh on the poetic and poiesis of the Brazilian electroacoustic production. We were also able to shed some light on how (and if) Brazilian composers relate to these matrices aesthetically and if their relation to them is merely technical, as well as trying to understand how clear cut the borders are between these two aspects of musical creation. The concepts of oppositional culture (Ogbu 1978) and established and outsiders (Elias and Scotson 2000) also helped us understand the dynamics between academia and a certain anti-academic stance seen in some composers of the genre. Using these same concepts, we elaborate, in a final note, on some brief comments about a newer generation of composers who, due to various aspects, were filtered out during the early methodological stages.

The highly rewarding experience of electronic music persists throughout our daily lives. Our immediate environments are replete with events that emit sounds that are extremely complex. Electronic music engages with the listening habits we take for granted in our everyday lives, and reveals how intricate they can be. Inspired by such intricacies, I have conducted a series of listening experiments with 80 participants over the course of three years to explore the cognition of electronic music. In this article, I will first present the method and the results of this experiment, including a categorical analysis of mental associations evoked by different works of electronic music. Next, I will offer a discussion of narrativity in electronic music supported by these results and diverse perspectives on narrativity from a number of disciplines. I will then construct a definition of gestures as narrative units in electronic music in relation to events in the environment. In doing so, I will bring together various theories on electronic music with not only the findings of the current study but also existing research on auditory cognition.

This article argues for the habilitation of a concept of style in electroacoustic music. It surveys the reasons for the neglect of style, looking in particular at the modernist embedding of electroacoustic theory and the consequences of postmodern genre formations. It considers the extent to which academic understanding of the materiality of music has moved from the analysis of sound to the analysis of media. It offers a critique of notions of sonic inclusivity and the differentiation of electroacoustic music from instrumental music. It emphasises the importance of comparative analysis and understanding the elements of style in electroacoustic music. It critically examines a number of techniques and frameworks for stylistic analysis. It concludes by encouraging the electroacoustic music community to engage more fully with notions of style.

Beginning with a brief overview of acousmatic narrative, this article proposes that in listening to acousmatic music we select and move between distinct narrative modes, according to the requirements and implications of a given work, or shifting between modes as the work progresses. Similarities and differences with existing theory are considered. Ten narrative modes are proposed as relevant for acousmatic music and discussed. Finally, the appearance of narrative archetypes across multiple modes is considered, as well as similarities across other musics and other fields.

This article explores the workings of genre in experimental electronic musics. Predominantly sociological in orientation, it has three main foci. First, it addresses practitioners’ and theorists’ resistances to the concept of genre in experimental musics. Drawing on recent developments in genre theory, it discusses the problems of agency, mediation and scale that any discussion of genre calls forth, pitting them alongside theories that emphasise genre’s necessity and inevitability in communication. The second section examines the politics of genre as they play out in practice, focusing on the Prix Ars Electronica festival and the controversy that ensued from the decision to change the name of the Computer Music category in 1999. The analysis focuses on issues of institutional mediation, historicity, genre emergence and the politics of labelling as they come into view when two broad spheres – electroacoustic art music and ‘popular’ electronic music – are brought into the same field together in competition. The third section deepens the analysis of Ars Electronica by zooming in on one of the represented genres, microsound, to examine how it is shaped and negotiated in practice. Using digital methods tools developed in the context of Actor-Network Theory, I present a view of the genre as fundamentally promiscuous, overlapping liberally with adjacent genres. Fusing Derrida’s principle of ‘participation over belonging’ with ANT’s insistence on the agency of ‘non-human actors’ in social assemblages, the map provides a means to analyse the genre through its mediations – through the varied industries, institutions and social networks that support and maintain it.

This article posits the notion of the post-acousmatic. It considers the work of contemporary practitioners who are indebted to the Schaefferian heritage, but pursue alternative trajectories from the established canonical discourse of acousmatic music. It will outline the authors’ definition of the term and also outline a network of elements such as time, rhythm, pitch, dynamics, noise and performance to discuss work that the authors’ consider to be a critique, an augmentation and an outgrowth of acousmatic music and thinking.

Sonic narratives on fixed media can take many forms. We may find complexly nuanced sound productions that rely on a broad range of implied and/or culturally shared non-verbal cues to convey a narrative progression. But we also frequently find creative productions centred upon the human voice, much like traditional storytelling but presented in the wider variety of performed, captured, or constructed contexts enabled by technology. In those productions, human voice without a visible physical source will represent, if only in the historic sense, the essence of the acousmatic – an unseen speaker addressing assembled listeners. And, although precise listener responses to that unseen voice will certainly vary, we typically respond quite strongly when directly addressed by another human voice. What are some of the attributes of voice that can trigger those strong responses? And, more pragmatically, what questions should composers consider as we attempt to harness that power for our own creative ends? In this article, we raise some of those questions for consideration, with the hope that readers – particularly those who are also sonic creators – will seek to answer them through their own creative practice.

This article attempts to explore working methods for developing hybrid tendencies within electroacoustic music compositions. These working methods, such as the novel concept of reconstructive sampling, are each explored with musical examples given. The article opens by giving definitions of genre, and then explores hybridisation as a concept through ideas developed by Duff (2000), Waters (2000) and Frow (2015). While the article focuses on the musical output of the author, personal compositions are placed in a broader context through the discussion of other artists within the wider field of electronic music composition.

This article serves as an introduction to the ‘hybridity table’, which is a systematic compositional tool designed to aid in the creation of balanced cross-genre hybrid music. The hybridity table was developed as part of my doctoral research, and has been utilised in my ongoing creative practice-based research. The article will, in a broad sense, discuss the terms ‘genre’ and ‘hybridity’, drawing from the current literature, and will attempt to clarify how an understanding of these terms was utilised in the development of the hybridity table. Also included is a brief example of the table used in the composition of a short piece – Tracking Forward – as well as a discussion of key considerations for composing hybrid music using this table. Through outlining this new compositional tool it is hoped that this method might be utilised by other composers in their own creation of balanced cross-genre hybrid music.

The purpose of this article is to explore the idea of relating storytelling with acousmatic music in the creation of a hybrid vehicle for transmitting stories. The concept of acousmatic storytelling is introduced, illustrated by the example of one of my own works which was created with the elements and techniques of storytelling as its conceptual basis. The article continues to investigate concepts of acousmatic storytelling in works from the repertoire of electroacoustic music, with composers such as Ferrari, Westerkamp, Derbyshire, Cousins and Young providing especially pertinent examples. Acousmatic storytelling integrates interviews, archival recordings, soundscape recordings, sonic icons and music quotations; the microphone becomes a time machine, ‘thought capturer’ and a conduit for conveying cultural information, elements which, combined with the sonic world composed in the studio, create a hybrid form. The concepts introduced in this article are useful for all those working with recorded sound, offering an approach to sonic creativity based on storytelling techniques and the way we experience past events through memory and sound recording. Acousmatic storytelling transmits a unique version of a story to the mind of the listener, who participates in the creation of the story and acts as co-creator of that story as experienced. In applying the methodology of interviews as well as researching past events and ‘writing’ about them, acousmatic storytelling composers can also be seen as historians and journalists.

Trip hop music emerged in the early 1990s, however, as a label the term ‘trip hop’ has always been problematic. Portishead, Massive Attack and Tricky, the artists frequently credited with creating trip hop, have unanimously rejected the label, claiming their music has nothing to do with trip hop. Despite the artists’ objections, music industrialists, fans and academics continually label their music trip hop or its alternate term ‘Bristol sound’, though specifics are never given as to what, if anything, distinguishes the two terms. This article seeks to mediate the discussion between opposing viewpoints by describing the Bristol sound as a style that relates to the trip hop genre. Following the introduction, the second section discusses the controversy surrounding the term ‘trip hop’ and suggests possible reasons behind the artists’ rejection of the label. The third section addresses the terms ‘genre’ and ‘style’ and outlines their similar points of reference while also highlighting their different areas of inquiry. The final section analyses several trip hop songs and identifies common elements that relate to the trip hop genre, before identifying explicit differences that distinguish the Bristol sound style. The analysis of style focuses on the spectral quality of the works and draws from Smalley’s (1997) theory of spectromorphology.

In this article we discuss how contemporary computational and electronic music-making practices might be characterised as a post-digital avant-garde. We also discuss how practitioners within the higher education sector can play a role in leading the development of these practices through their research and teaching. A brief overview of twentieth-century avant-garde practices is provided to set the scene before a case for defining a post-digital avant-garde is made. By way of illustration, the authors describe their own post-digital creative practices and then discuss how these integrate into their academic duties. We reflect on themes that run through avant-garde practices and continue into the post-digital. Finally, we describe how these themes inform an undergraduate music technology programme such that it might be shaped to reflect these developments and prepare students for a post-digital future.

Real-time computer music is now common and ubiquitous, no longer a new or experimental practice. In its infancy, it helped to solve perceived issues with the fixity of tape pieces, a natural continuation in the practice of live electronics. However, real-time computer music did not have the same consequences as live electronic music. This situation engendered many discussions about the liveness of real-time computer music performances at the time. It is now 20 years past those first conversations, and it is important to revisit what is ‘live’ and how it applies to real-time musics. Additionally, in some ways, the language surrounding descriptions of fixed medium works, mixed works, live electronics and real-time computer music has evolved and, perhaps, even settled into conventions distinguishing musical approach and philosophies. This article first defines the language, not to proselytise, but rather to ground the argument. The conclusion asserts that liveness is a spectrum despite the fact that ‘live’ is often used categorically. Though one may have an intuitive understanding of what constitutes a ‘live’ event, this article explicitly articulates the most significantly contributive factors. The nature of real-time computer music is explored in relation to these factors of liveness. Using musical examples, this article shows that ‘real-time’ music does not guarantee a ‘live’ performance, contrary to what is typically held to be true. Instead, ‘real-time’ simply becomes a descriptor of compositional method, and any real-time work can exist along a broad range of the liveness spectrum.

This article considers the presence of ‘self-reflexive narrative’ in field recording. The authors interrogate a common presumption within sonic arts practice and sound studies discourse that field recordings represent authentic, impartial and neutral documents. Historically, field recording practice has not clearly represented narratives of how, when, why and by whom a field recording is made. In contrast, the social sciences have already experienced a narrative ‘turn’ since the 1970s, which highlighted the importance of recognising the presence and role of the researcher in the field, and also in representations of fieldwork. This provides an alternative framework for understanding field recording, in considering the importance of the recordist and their relationship with their recordings. Many sonic arts practitioners have already acknowledged that the subjective, personal qualities of field recording should be embraced, highlighted and even orated in their work. The authors’ own collaborative project Thoughts in the Field further explores these ideas, by vocalising ‘self-reflexive narratives’ in real time, within field recordings. The authors’ collaborative composition, Getting Lost (2015), demonstrates the compositional potentials this approach offers.

Cold, stripped-down, monochrome, pixelated, iterative, quantised, grid, pulse, glitch, noise: taken together, these words imply a growing aesthetic connection within a body of experimental and independent (or non-academic) sound-based artworks produced in the past few decades. Although realised in different mediums and belonging to different artistic categories, such works are connected through a certain aesthetic sensibility. Nevertheless, since the majority of these works have thus far received little scholarly attention, a framing discussion of the aesthetic principles and features that link them is overdue. This article examines this emergent phenomenon, accounting for the particular aesthetic features that connect such sound-based artworks, arguing for a more specific terminology to adequately account for this aesthetic across the various practices in which it is observed. Rejecting ‘minimalist’ as a descriptor, this article calls for an aesthetic frame of reference derived through Brutalism, understood as a crystallisation of key features of modernism and its various movements. The first author’s work is presented as a conscious effort to create sound art redolent of Brutalism, locating this work in the context of the revival of Brutalism in recent years, which, as will be argued, can be expanded to works from a wide range of contemporary artists and musicians.

Over the past few years, I have developed a form of composition – which I call music–text–film – in which I explore the dynamics between sound, words and visuals. In this article I will attempt to explain how meaning is constructed in the interplay between these layers of media. Taking as an example three of my works, Subliminal: The Lucretian Picnic, Dreams of the Blind and The Arrest, I analyse and discuss aspects of narrative, point of view, metaphor and cross-modal perception, as a way of understanding how multimedia art, specifically in the audiovisual domain, is experienced. One of the issues that arose out of these pieces was the question of location of the ‘voice’. It is as if a state of limbo is created between the narrative voice of the text and the implied voice of the music, due to the absence of a conventional focal point to pin it on – an actor or a singer. I would like to suggest that because of this vacancy and the way the projected word takes the place of the sung or spoken voice, the inner voice of the audience becomes activated. This then becomes a vital immersive dimension in the performance, as the inner voice of the audience finds its place within the space of the composition.

This article applies a genre level approach to the tangled discourse surrounding the points of convergence between avant-garde electronica and electroacoustic music. More specifically the article addresses related experimental practices in these distinct yet related fields of electronic music-making. The democratisation of music technology continues to expand into an increasingly diverse set of musical fields, destabilising established power dynamics. A flexible, structured approach to the analysis of these relationships facilitates the navigation of crumbling boundaries and shifting relationships. Contemporary electronic music’s overlapping networks encompass varying forms of capital, aesthetics, technology, ideology, tools and techniques. These areas offer interesting points of convergence. As the discourse surrounding electronic music expands, so must the vocabulary and conceptual models used to describe and discuss new areas of converging artistic practice. Genre level diagrams selectively collapse, expand and arrange artistic fields, facilitating concrete, coherent arguments and the examination of patterns and relationships. Through the genre level diagram’s establishment of distinct yet flexible boundaries, electronic music’s sprawling discourse can be cordoned off, expanded or contracted to suit structured analyses. In this way, this approach clarifies scope and facilitates simultaneous examination from a variety of perspectives.