This paper discusses listener responses to a contemporary soundscape composition based on the sound of a cricket. Soundscape composers make works based on everyday sounds and sound environments, usually recorded by themselves (Truax 1984, 1996). While the composer of this piece aims to bring listeners closer to the sounds around them by creating audio pieces based on these sounds (Westerkamp 1988), some listeners feel fear and anxiety rather than the heightened closeness and understanding that she wishes listeners to experience. I compare the sound structure of Cricket Voice with close listening to excerpts of the film soundtrack of Ridley Scott's Alien as well as a short excerpt from the soundtrack of the X Files, discussing how science fiction film and television soundtracks index sonic intimacy with different intent from that of Westerkamp, and raising questions about how such approaches to intimacy might simultaneously reflect and intensify urban anxieties about the sounds of ‘alien’ species that are associated with wilderness environments.

This article discusses space and interactivity in relation to some of the author's compositions for performers and computer. It outlines approaches to musical space relevant to those works arising from the realms of acousmatic, instrumental/acoustic and soundscape composition, and explores the conflict arising when a variety of listening practices are employed by the spectator-listener. This conflict challenges the perceived boundaries that differentiate genres, and also challenges the significance of existing ‘instrumental’ definitions of interactive computer music to the author's work. The author's approach to investigating this issue through composition is discussed, using two pieces as examples: Words on the streets are these (2001), an interactive installation, and Still Life (2002), a concert piece for string quartet and live electroacoustics. Technical and aesthetic aspects are outlined, specifically in relation to the experience of the spectator-listener. The overall aim is to emphasise the importance of considering spatial issues in composing interactive music, and to examine how the interplay of spatial concepts might be explored in practice.

In this paper we describe a new way of thinking about musical tones, specifically in the context of how features of a sound might be controlled by computer musicians, and how those features might be most appropriately mapped onto musical controllers. Our approach is the consequence of one bias that we should reveal at the outset: we believe that electronically controlled (and this includes computer-controlled)musical instruments need to be emancipated from the keyboard metaphor; although piano-like keyboards are convenient and familiar, they limit the musician's expressiveness (Mathews 1991, Vertegaal and Eaglestone 1996, Paradiso 1997, Levitin and Adams 1998). This is especially true in the domain of computer music,in which timbres can be created that go far beyond the physical constraints of traditional acoustic instruments.

1. EXPLORING THE CONNECTION

The term soundscape composition did not exist when I started composing with environmental sounds in the mid-1970s. Through a variety of fortunate circumstances and because of what the 1970s were in Vancouver and Canada - artistically inspiring and moneys were available for adventurous and culturally, socially, politically progressive projects - I had discovered that environmental sounds were the perfect compositional ‘language’ for me. I had learnt much while working with the World Soundscape Project at Simon Fraser University, about listening, about the properties of sound, about noise, the issues we face regarding the quality of the sound environment and much more. This in combination with learning to record and to work with analog technology in the sonic studio allowed me to speak with sound in a way I found irresistible. In addition, the start-up of Vancouver Co-operative Radio gave us the - at that time rare - opportunity to broadcast our work. It was a place where cultural exploration and political activism could meet. It was from within this exciting context of ecological concern for the soundscape and the availability of an alternate media outlet that my compositional work - now often called soundscape composition - emerged. And it came as a surprise to me, as I had never thought of composing nor of broadcasting as a professional choice in my life.

Zagreb Everywhere (2001), a video portrayal of the city of Zagreb, Croatia, is the result of an international collaboration between writer Gordana Crnković (Croatia), video artist Victor Ingrassia (US), and composer David Hahn (US), who collected sounds from Zagreb and together with some of his own music created the soundscape for the piece. Opposing stereotypes about the ‘barbaric Balkans’ often reinforced by Western media during the recent war in that region, Zagreb Everywhere provides a unique view of Zagreb and its inimitable features, while at the same time showing the experiences of that city and its people as having a broad human appeal and resonance. The piece exists in two formats: (i) a stand-alone video work, and (ii) a multimedia performance piece with projected visual images, sound, and live narration. After a brief recounting of the genesis of the idea for Zagreb Everywhere and the main aesthetic aspects of the project, this paper discusses the methods in which the sounds were collected in the field and compiled, how these sounds were edited in the studio, and how the entire piece was assembled. Zagreb Everywhere premiered in May 2001 at the University of Washington in Seattle.

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.

This paper describes a trans-domain mapping (TDM) framework for translating meaningful activities from one creative domain onto another. The multi-disciplinary framework is designed to facilitate an intuitive and non-intrusive interactive multimedia performance interface that offers the users or performers real-time control of multimedia events using their physical movements. It is intended to be a highly dynamic real-time performance tool, sensing and tracking activities and changes, in order to provide interactive multimedia performances.

From a straightforward definition of the TDM framework, this paper reports several implementations and multi-disciplinary collaborative projects using the proposed framework, including a motion and colour-sensitive system, a sensor-based system for triggering musical events, and a distributed multimedia server for audio mapping of a real-time face tracker, and discusses different aspects of mapping strategies in their context.

Plausible future directions, developments and exploration with the proposed framework, including stage augmenta tion, virtual and augmented reality, which involve sensing and mapping of physical and non-physical changes onto multimedia control events, are discussed.

In mixed electroacoustic music it is common to find the erroneous conception according to which interaction should base itself exclusively on the fusion between instrumental writing and electronic devices, whereas the contrast between these sound spheres is as significant as the fusional states. Although fusion may be seen as the most important ingredient for an efficacious compositional strategy concerning interaction, it is actually through contrast that the identities of spectral transfers in mixed composition can be evaluated by the listener. This text intends to introduce a discussion about the many possibilities offered by the morphology of interaction between acoustic sources and electroacoustic resources and structures. In this sense it tries to identify intermediate types between the extremes of pure fusion and pure contrast, which can be established by the composer that sees in interactive music one of the most advantageous poetic realms of electroacoustic music.

The Metasaxophone is an acoustic tenor saxophone retrofitted with an onboard computer microprocessor and an array of sensors that convert performance data into MIDI control messages. The instrument has additionally been outfitted with a unique microphone system that allows for detailed control of the amplified sound. While maintaining full acoustic functionality it is also a versatile MIDI controller and an electric instrument. A primary motivation behind the Metasaxophone is to put signal processing under direct expressive control of the performer. Through the combination of gestural and audio performance control, employing both discrete and continuous multilayered mapping strategies, the Metasaxophone can be adapted for a wide range of musical purposes. This paper explores the artistic and technical development of the instrument, as well as new conceptions of musical mappings arising from the enhanced interface.

This article traces the audio production and soundscape composition for a multimedia work for any solo instrument, colour video, and digital sound. There is an account of earlier soundscape recordings of the Brooklyn Bridge. A description of the visual images of Jones Street is followed by a portrayal of the street life and consequent soundscape. There is a report on stereo recording techniques, the sounds that were gathered, and the sounds that were selected as source material. A discussion of philosophical and aesthetic considerations precedes a detailed explanation of the digital processing and composing methods.

Schizophonic soundscapes in Murray Schafer's critical acoustic ecology mean a split between listening and seeing, between space and place, between audience and communicator. His idea of a gap between senses is based on electronic media like radio and telephone, but it gains new actuality in modern (multimedia) times. The new technology and its users have too experimented with the creative inversion of schizophony in sound and vision. Film sound design and film music combine sound in and out of context, composition works with contrapunctual audiovisions; video art and sound art, as in the work of Robert Cahen, combine and mix genres of all kinds and senses. MetaSon #5 Skruv Stockholm is an audiovisual soundwalk, based on soundscape recordings in Sweden in the 1970s and 1990s, combined with associative pictures and designs, each in its own rhythms and times. It consists less of the common meaning both share, being more dependent on the fluidity and dynamic of the relationship between the elements. Sound and image create an intermedium, intermodal space neither of which could project alone. From moment to moment, schizophonic montage and idea invert into a fresh, maybe evocative look at the way we perceive, where the audio flow transforms stable pictures into liquid forms, where image follows sound and is treated like sound.

The vBow, a virtual violin bow musical controller, has been designed to provide the computer musician with most of the gestural freedom of a bow on a violin string. Four cable and servomotor systems allow for four degrees of freedom, including the lateral motion of a bow stroke across a string, the rotational motion of a bow crossing strings, the vertical motion of a bow approaching and pushing into a string, and the longitudinal motion of a bow travelling along the length of a string. Encoders, attached to the shaft of the servomotors, sense the gesture of the performer, through the rotation of the servomotor shafts, turned by the motion of the cables. The data from each encoder is mapped to a parameter in synthesis software of a bowed-string physical model. The software also sends control voltages to the servomotors, engaging them and the cables attached to them with a haptic feedback simulation of friction, vibration, detents and elasticity.

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.

Modalys-ER is a graphical environment for creating physical model instruments and generating musical sounds with them. While Modalys-ER provides users with a relatively simple-to-use interface, it has only limited methods for mapping control data onto model parameters for performance. While these are sufficient for many interesting applications, they do not bridge the gap from high-level specifications such as MIDI files or Standard Western Notation (SWN) down to low-level parameters within the physical model. With this issue in mind, a part of Modalys-ER has now been ported to OpenMusic, providing a platform for developing more sophisticated automation and control systems that can be specified through OpenMusic's visual programming interface. An overview of the MfOM library is presented and illustrated with several musical examples using some early mapping designs. Also, some of the issues relating to building and controlling virtual instruments are discussed and future directions for research in this area are suggested. The first release is now available via the IRCAM Software Forum.

The Organised Sound Volume 7 CD contains both audio and video. Video material can only be viewed from a computer system. The CD will play all the audio tracks and sound examples in a standard audio CD player.