This article discusses the use of an accessible visual notation system that represents the melodic component of an electronic music composition in acid house music, based on programming the Roland TB-303 bassline synthesiser’s sequencer. This notation system can be used for sharing, composition, collaboration and archival purposes. This system is called an acid pattern. The article analyses a variety of different approaches to communicate acid patterns. It examines the requirements and visual elements used and how they relate directly to the functionality of the Roland TB-303’s sequencer. Through content analysis of images, text and audio data gathered from various music community websites this article furthers the understanding of how the practices and cultures of acid house music composition, notation and archiving are shared online and how they, enabled by web-based technologies, can build communities. This article suggests important possibilities for communities of practice-based around a shared cultural identity, accessible notation systems, and the creation and recreation of music in both online and offline contexts.

For slightly more than 30 years I have been developing audio software and hardware under the moniker soundhack. Through these years I have programmed applications, plugins, externals, hardware and Eurorack modules – usually focusing on signal processing techniques and applications that are not easily available or offered by mainstream software companies. In this article, I would like to share my point of view and relate the rationale behind the development of these tools, my evolving sonic and design aesthetic, and some of the advantages, disadvantages and other differences between the the various hardware and software contexts.

In this interview, Tom Erbe reflects on his three decades as a developer of computer music software and hardware, both freeware and commercial. Tom met with Theodore Gordon on 8 December 2021 and discussed the beginnings of SoundHack and its roots in experimental music studio practice and hacker culture, ideas behind the design of sound processor interface and the shift from experimental software development to Eurorack modular hardware design.

This article investigates two current incarnations of ‘lo-fi’ music and questions the extent to which these subgenres are actually low in fidelity. In essence, mainstream ‘hi-fi’ productions use similar effects, such as filtering to sound like a radio or adding noise to sound like a vinyl record. To understand lo-fi today, this article explores music by a lo-fi hip-hop producer and a lo-fi ambient producer, drawing upon the analytical methods of Alan Moore and Dennis Smalley. First to be discussed is Glimlip, one of the many anonymous producers behind the popular Lofi Girl YouTube streams. The next discussed is Amulets, an ambient musician known for using hacked and looped cassette tapes. Analyses of their music demonstrate a level of care in production that goes against the idea that lo-fi is primitive or naive.

The conceptual sound artist, turntablist, and curator Maria Chavez muses about storing and accessing sounds. Building on Ursula Le Guin’s concept of the carrier bag, she describes four eras of sound recording and containment.

This article draws on a practice theory perspective to investigate instances of sound practice in a particular community of technology use by focusing on the community and product offerings in and around contemporary modular synthesisers and their growing popularity in the ‘Eurorack’ format in order to investigate the attraction and allure of analogue things in a digital age. This article identifies issues of authenticity, legitimacy and creativity as key drivers of the way we project our identities onto objects and the intimate technologies we own, and the search for meaningful technological encounters. In the realm of sound practice, the follow-up questions are similar: why when there is software and affordable digital alternatives, do some musicians swear by modular synthesis given the commitment this practice requires in terms of money, time, self-education and exploration (and for a lack of a better term) tinkering? With Eurorack as a case study, this article investigates the attraction and allure of analogue things in a digital age by investigating meaningful sound practice as emerging out of the discourses of online communities around the modular synth phenomenon.

Composers, producers and educators King Britt and Tara Rodgers discuss music technology history and pedagogy in the context of King Britt’s Blacktronika course at the University of California San Diego, which researches and celebrates Black artists and other artists of colour who are pioneers of electronic music genres. Conducted over email in June 2021, this interview also touches on King Britt’s studio practice and evolution as an artist and educator, as well as on the social and political roots of contemporary electronic music genres.

This article argues that pop music’s increasing assimilation of hip-hop and EDM (electronic dance music) practices combine with computational automation and this has substantial consequences for musical space. Traditional ‘space-makers’ such as reverb or delay are subject to other functions such as frequency filters and compression that interrelate processual layers of textures. Instead of an active-listener-orientated sonic space with distinct source-bonded entities, it is based on a particular sonic materiality. With a new media theoretical approach, I consequently argue that this new type of space can better be understood as a mediatised topological materiality.

The oeuvre of Japanese composer Yuasa Jōji holds a singular place in the contemporary musical landscape. From the artist collective Jikken Kōbō, in which he took part during the 1950s, to his later pieces for large orchestra, and through his innovative electroacoustic and mixed-music, Yuasa single-handedly explored a vast number of musical issues across the twentieth century. This article aims to shed a new light on the composer’s substantial musical output through his interest in topological theories. It will be a question of showing through examples, the different outcomes of the application of this mathematical model in the musical domain, all the while demonstrating how it takes place within his nexus of influences, as a centre towards which many other of Yuasa’s interests converge.

The most recent practices in sound art have emerged as pre-eminent spaces in which to question the interaction of sound with its environment. Accordingly, in this article, I envisage Arrhythmia, the sound installation by Bosch and Simons with Kostyrko (2019), as a device that helps to outline a horizontal sound ecology. This approach, which takes as its starting point the sound and material vibration in its entirety, implies a positive acceptance of an ontological continuity between the human and the non-human. This, in turn, implies that issues such as biopolitics cannot be reduced to the human realm. With this in mind, Arrhythmia emerges as a new kind of singular entity from which relationships with the environment can be conceived in a non-fragmented way.