The song of the blackcap (Sylvia atricapilla) has been a subject of fascination among Europeans for centuries. In the first half of the article, I present factors that influenced the evaluation of the bird’s song between the seventeenth and early twentieth centuries, and dedicate the second half to developments in the past sixty years. In the 1950s, two mutually exclusive interpretations of the bird’s song appeared: one connected to Péter Szőke and his sound microscope and the other to Olivier Messiaen and his organ. I draw a parallel between this duality and the ‘sound-based’–‘note-based’ dichotomy that has been naturalised in the discourse about sonic culture during the last decade. I examine what this dichotomy and the natural experience of the blackcap’s song can reveal about one other, shedding light on what may be viewed as the most influential source for this centuries-long fascination.

What is ‘orchestral’ about a networked laptop orchestra? And what is network-like about a classical orchestra? This article juxtaposes orchestras, nineteenth-century music machines and twenty-first-century network music projects. Drawing on organology and cybernetics, it asks how these systems connect people and instruments. It considers interaction and coordination in particular networks, from the panharmonicon to PLork, but also their abstract informational topologies. Ultimately, orchestra machines, old and new, involve both technical and social organisation – and, as such, they can be used to problematise the ontological separation of technology and society.

Since the late twentieth century, the development of cybernetics, physical computing and robotics has led artists and researchers to create musical systems that explore the relationship between human bodies and mechanical systems. Anthropomorphic musical robots and bodily integrated ‘cyborg’ sensor interfaces explore complementary manifestations of what we call the ‘anthropomorphic analogy’, which probes the boundary between human artificer and artificial machine, encouraging listeners and viewers to humanise non-musical machines and understand the human body itself as a mechanical instrument.

These new approaches to the anthropomorphic analogy benefit from historical contextualisation. At numerous points in the history of Western art music, philosophers, critics, composers, performers and instrument designers have considered the relationship between human musician and musical instrument, often blurring the line between the two. Consideration of historical examples enriches understandings of anthropomorphism in contemporary music technology.

This article juxtaposes the anthropomorphic analogy in contemporary musical culture with manifestations of anthropomorphism in early seventeenth-century Europe. The first half of the seventeenth century witnessed a flourishing of instrumentality of all sorts. Musical instruments were linked with the telescope, the clock, the barometer, the paintbrush, and many other instruments and machines, and these came to be understood as vehicles for the creation of knowledge. This flourishing of instrumental culture created new opportunities for contemplation and aesthetic wonder, as theorists considered the line between human being and machine – between nature and artifice. Manifestations of the anthropomorphic analogy in seventeenth-century conceptions of musical instruments help to contextualise and explain similar articulations of the anthropomorphic analogy in the present day.

This article seeks to articulate the interaction between archival sound recordings and the contemporary media, arguing that digitisation and post-digital mediation have led to the interpretation of historical sound recordings as object-disoriented sonic artefacts drifting through the contemporary media environment. Investigating past, current and ongoing sound-based artistic projects and artworks as case studies, the article substantiates the argument by addressing questions of identity, mediation and interpretation in the post-digital condition of contemporary media. These projects are examined in order to gain understanding of how the source materials are often derived from older sounds, such as the pre-electric era early sound recordings made in India on shellacs and cylinders, and how they are reused in artistic production following their re-interpretation as object-disoriented sonic artefacts.

The social and sociological implications of what David Beer calls the ‘precarious double life’ of the recording engineer – a technical professional on one hand, an artistic one on the other – are only recently coming to the fore in scholarship. Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network theory and the Social Construction of Technology theory pioneered by Trevor Pinch, as well as the contributions of Susan Schmidt-Horning and Beer himself, have begun to give us an intellectual framework to examine how social forces shape sound technology and the variegated implications of that shaping.

This article examines the case of the ‘bilingualism’ required of the recording engineer. Drawing on primary sources from across the twentieth century, it traces the case of scientific terminology becoming musical terminology, that musical terminology becoming ingrained in consumer culture, and that ingrained, well-understood musical terminology becoming, finally, metaphorical.

We trace the case of spectral terminology from Joseph P. Maxfield’s articles explaining electromechanical recording to a general audience in the publication Scientific American in the 1930 s, through the application of spectral terminology in advertising during the hi-fi boom of the midcentury, and finally to the metaphorical use of the same terminology in popular music in the last two decades of the century. We show, then, that it is not only the audio engineer, but also their terminology itself that participates in a ‘double life’.

Knut Wiggen (1927–2016) is not a household name in music technology, despite the fact that he developed cutting-edge technology during the 1960s and early 1970s in Stockholm, as leader of both the concert organisation Fylkingen and the Electronic Music Studio (EMS). In the international literature on computer music, this development has only been mentioned in passing, if at all. However, EMS and the general development has been discussed in Scandinavian texts,1 but the links between Knut Wiggen’s technical achievements and his far-reaching ambitions for the music of the future, and how this vision aligned with philosophy and research at the time, have not been the focus. Hartenstein (2011) provides insights into Wiggen’s personal intentions and philosophy, and does not go much into technical detail, Groth (2010) focuses principally on the politics and aesthetic differences and subsequent conflicts at EMS, and although an overview of the EMS technology is provided, it is not always made clear how innovative it was. In Broman (2007), the broader lines of electroacoustic musical development are in focus.

Wiggen combined social and political concerns with technical insight, and his overarching conviction of how a new art was necessary as a counterweight to mute consumerism is unique in computer music. The aim of this article is to describe and explain the coherency of Wiggen’s achievements, his philosophy, his use of current technological advances and research and his development of a new method for composing the music of the future. In order to support this focus, mainly primary sources have been used,2 however, the literature mentioned above has been consulted due to its use of interview data and other personal communication not commonly available. A degree of duplication of information has been required for the narrative not to suffer.

The article will show that Wiggen was a visionary pioneer who has a natural place among such computer music luminaries as Max Mathews, Jean-Claude Risset, John Chowning, Iannis Xenakis, Peter Zinovieff and others from the same generation.

In The Soundscape, R. Murray Schafer describes a tone of ‘prime unity’, a tonal centre conditioning an international sonic unconscious. Diverging from the bucolic image of nature readily associated with Schafer’s ethics and aesthetics, this tone is found in the ubiquitous hum of electrical infrastructure and appliances. A utopian potential is ascribed to this tone in Schafer’s writing whereby it constitutes the conditions for a unified international acoustic community of listening subjects.

This article outlines Schafer’s anomalous concept of the tone of prime unity and interrogates the contradictions it introduces into Schafer’s project of utopian soundscape design. Discussion of the correspondence between Schafer and Marshall McLuhan contextualises and identifies the source of Schafer’s concept of the tone of prime unity. Of particular interest is the processes of unconscious auditory influence this concept entails and its problematic relation to the politics of sonic warfare. Through discussion of contemporary artistic practices that engage with these problems, it is argued that the tone of prime unity nonetheless presents an opportunity to shift the focus of Schafer’s project from a telos of divine harmony towards collective self-determination through participatory intervention in the world around us.