Braiding sound–listening–learning (encouraged by composer Pauline Oliveros) with critical consciousness (inspired by educator Paulo Freire), the authors led a location-specific, socially engaged sound art project in Rhode Island (USA). The authors describe a style of socially engaged sound art that approaches the object of art as a dialogic process of learning.

This article explores the distribution of creative agency between artists and audiences in participatory sound art through the lens of perspective theory. In contemporary creativity studies, perspective is taken to mean the way in which an actor’s perception of the environment is structured by their intention to act. According to Vlad Glaveanu, constructing and taking new perspectives constitutes a necessary condition for creative acts as it reveals new affordances of the creator’s materials. In this article, I investigate the perspectives of sound artists and participants through ethnographic case studies of Katrine Faber’s participatory performance Let Us Sing Your Place and Benoît Maubrey’s interactive Speaker Sculptures. In Faber’s performance, the participants use their voices to recreate the soundscape of a place described by one of them. Maubrey’s sculptures are large structures built out of loudspeakers through which the participants can play their own sounds via Bluetooth, phone lines or directly plugged-in microphone. Analysing ethnographic observations and interviews with artists and participants in the two case studies, I discuss how their perspectives are constructed and communicated through artwork’s materialities. Exploring the particularity of perspectives induced by participatory sound art, I show how it challenges a number of conventional ideas about sound and auditory culture.

This article reports on an interview-based study with ten sound artists and composers, all engaged in situated sonic practices. We propose that these artists engage the ear and shape possible interactions with the artwork by altering the relationship between sound, the space in which it is heard and the people who hear it. Our interviews probe the creative process and explore how a sound artist’s methods and tools might influence the reception of their work. A thematic analysis of interview transcriptions leads us to characterise artist processes as mediatory, in the sense that they act in between site and audience experience and are guided by the non-human agencies of settings and material things. We propose that artists transfer their own situated and embodied listening to that of the audience and develop sonic and staging devices to direct perceptual activity and listening attention. Our findings also highlight a number of engagement challenges, in particular the difficulty artists face in understanding their audience’s experience and the specificity of an artwork’s effect not just to its location but also to the disposition, abilities and prior experiences of listeners.

This article sketches a theoretical framework that allows the conceptual inclusion of non-human animals and artificial intelligences in human sonic collaborations. Post-humanist concepts that question the categorical divide between nature and culture, following Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour, converge with contemporary, non-adaptationist evolutionary aesthetics. Therefore, the anthropocentric ‘othering’ of non-humans gives way to a concept of a more-than-human sociality of sound. We offer some theoretical propositions for the extension of socially engaged sound practices to collaborations between humans and non-human animals and between humans and artificial intelligences, and then exemplify such multispecies sonic collaborations by analysing some existing projects from the fields of sound art and musical performance. After drawing some more general conclusions from these analyses, we hint at potential aesthetical and ethical parallels between animal and AI creative agency. Finally, we point out a few questions we see as important for future advanced settings of such collaborations, especially when it comes to assemblages of different AI technologies and to future concepts of animal–computer interaction that might enable non-human animals and artificial intelligence to cooperate creatively.

This article considers some of the potential advantages that creators without formal training – Barthes’s ‘amateurs’ – have employed in collaborative processes to make sound art and also considers ways in which the approach may open fresh forms of social engagement. Drawing on the author’s collaborative practice in sound creation, Maria Lind’s classification of types of collaboration is extended to develop the notion of a ‘quadruple’ variant. This is based on the relationship between human and non-human collaborators. The role of the ‘Trickster’ is developed as a means of supporting and facilitating amateurs operating in a radical context. I propose, and provide a manifesto for, a category of the ‘New Amateur’ who addresses social engagement in sound practices in at least two ways. First, via structural dependence on a notion of collaboration significantly expanded to include not only other humans but also materials, ideas and both non- and post-human entities. Second, by drawing upon the anarchist ethics and concepts of the Trickster to democratise artistic potential through collaborative and distributed authorship. Thus, the manifesto reflects a political dimension rooted in the everyday and reveals a route to social engagement via personal creative awakening. The New Amateur offers fresh possibilities in music and organised sound and engages via an unleashing of individual capability to mirror the ‘lines of flight’ pursued by John Cage, La Monte Young and Alan Kaprow. The mechanism initiated in this way locates individual creativity in the context of mutual aid. Social engagement is driven by individual creativity and the explosive awareness of the potential this awakens.

Bringing together an array of interdisciplinary subjects, this article seeks to proffer a theory of political aesthetic preference emergent within participatory musical works. Beginning with an overview of imitation in music and then recapping the critical work advanced by Kofi Agawu and Jean-Jacques Nattiez on musical semiology, this article first delves into how musical signs are interpreted and propagated within participatory settings. Subsequently, using Jürgen Habermas’s influential theory on the public sphere as well as the critical revisions to said theory proposed by Nancy Fraser and Michael Warner, participatory musics are conceptualised as constituting the formal space of a public in which the aesthetic direction of a participatory music work is negotiated among participants. Based on an analysis of Luke Dahl, Jorge Herrera and Carr Wilkerson’s multi-user instrument and participatory work TweetDreams, this article discusses the ways in which participant inputs and choices impact the poietic process of the work due to the clear rules that are set up within its interactive and algorithmic protocols for sonification. It concludes by pointing towards other recent research on participatory works, where the framing of participatory musics as a political–aesthetic space leads to broader questions about audience power and how the latter is negotiated and shared, then poses questions for future research on the audience’s choice in refusal and dissensus.

This paper explores participatory and socially engaged practices in ubiquitous music (ubimus). We discuss recent advances that target timbre as their focus while incorporating semantic strategies for knowledge transfer among participants. Creative Semantic Anchoring (ASC from the original in Portuguese) is a creative-action metaphor that shows promising preliminary results in collaborative asynchronous activities. Given its grounding in local resources and its support for explicit knowledge, ASC features a good potential to boost socially distributed knowledge. We discuss three strategies that consolidate and expand this approach within ubiquitous music and propose the label Radical ASC. We investigate the implications of this framework through the analysis of two artistic projects: Atravessamentos and Ntrallazzu.

This article delineates a metaphysical concept, musical community, and considers its implications for material practices in the art world. It describes ways in which two theoretically distant categories of art music, namely, electroacoustic music and the concert-hall tradition, may converge given the emergent societal and technological shifts in the information age. The concepts of ‘networks’ and ‘reciprocity’, as developed by sociologists Manuel Castells and Marcel Mauss, respectively, constitute the theoretical lens for this analysis, which sees a number of musicological notions, including ‘musical society’ and ‘acousmatics’ reconsidered philosophically. Emphasis is placed, in lieu of the insular methodologies associated with the akousmatikoi, on broader Pythagorean society, its mythical links with present-day musical society, which are explored in relation to practical as well as structural proclivities permeating contemporary art music. These philosophical considerations are then used, so as to provide a general theory of récit music, a musical form designed by the author enabling creative employment of the impasses introduced in the information age. Finally, different reciprocities of the form with contemporary and traditional compositional philosophies are discussed, serving as an overview of the various theoretical and formal facets of récit music as methodology, approached in terms of three propositions.

This article addresses the precedence given to sound in musical analysis and argues that socially engaged composers might reconsider the importance they place on sonic output and instead pay greater attention to how we critically engage with the subjects that stimulate our musical practice. G. Douglas Barrett’s theorisation of music ‘after sound’ is established as a crucial methodology, one that provides an important discourse around critical engagements that have largely been neglected in favour of investigations into abstracted sonic materials. The vocabulary provided by Barrett is, in this article, used to meaningfully appraise the impact of a situated musical performance and its dialogue with society. Specifically, the three authors collectively explore the implications of Barrett’s writing for the conception, formation and evaluation of their own socially engaged compositional practices. Subsequently, this discussion also illustrates the methods by which Barrett’s approach is instrumentalised as a compositional device for socially engaged composition, rather than as an analytical tool for already completed works. Finally, the authors conclude with an alternative exploration of what ultimately lies beyond a ‘music after sound’, one that problematises the notion of a specialist composer today.

Sentire is a body–machine interface that sonifies motor behaviour in real time and a participatory, interactive performance in which two people use their physical movements to collaboratively create sound while constantly being influenced by the results. Based on our informal observation that basal social behaviours emerge during Sentire performances, the present article investigates our principal hypothesis that Sentire can foster basic mechanisms underlying non-verbal social interaction. We illustrate how coordination serves as a crucial basic mechanism for social interaction, and consider how it is addressed by various therapeutic approaches, including therapeutic use of real-time auditory feedback. Then we argue that the implementation of Sentire may be fruitful in healthcare contexts and in promoting general well-being. We describe how the Sentire system has been developed further within the scope of the research project ‘Social interaction through sound feedback–Sentire’ that combines human–computer interaction, sound design and real-world research, against the background of the relationship between sound, sociality and therapy. The question concerning how interaction is facilitated through Sentire is addressed through the first results of behavioural analysis using structured observation, which allows for a quasi-quantitative sequential analysis of interactive behaviour.

In this article, we present Ear Talk – a co-composition and live performance project that enables remote music collaboration through technologically mediated systems. The Ear Talk project currently exists in two distinct implementations, one that repurposes YouTube’s live-streaming technology, and one that utilises a stand-alone website. Although Ear Talk was conceived prior to the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, the necessity for remote collaboration became more apparent during the lockdown, when a vast majority of live events and music concerts were cancelled. The Ear Talk project enables a socially distanced form of online musical collaboration and offers a platform through which to respond to such a crisis, and has grown to be adopted and presented by many different performing groups across the world. In addition to describing the technical implementations of these two systems, we discuss issues that arise from our participatory practice: from musical quality concerns in regard to social aesthetics and artistic ingenuity, to accessibility concerns when designing technologically mediated collaborative systems. Ear Talk embraces continuous musical loops as well as highly asynchronous (i.e., perpetual) collaborative paradigms among remote participants, which raises a conceptual inquiry as to which part of its sonic and social experience constitutes music in the end. Finally, we evaluate performer–audience relationships (i.e., hierarchical versus horizontal interactions) and the efficacy of the Ear Talk systems at enabling socially engaged co-composition.

This article examines works for live, interactive electronics from the perspective of complex dynamic systems, placing the human–computer interaction within a wider set of relationships. From this perspective, composing equates to constructing a complex system with the performer(s) and the computer as key players within a wider network of interdependence. Using the author’s own compositions as examples, this article investigates the utility of a system view on interactive, live electronics.

Despite the sine wave’s close links to the birth of electronic music in the mid-twentieth century, it has been little studied aesthetically, and no systematic review of its artistic usages exists. This article presents a brief literature review, followed by the results of a survey on the principles guiding sine wave-based works. This allows to put forward a typological framework contributing to an understanding of the application of the sine wave in music.