This article proposes an analytical perspective on the aural analysis of human–machine interaction. Starting from Pierre Schaeffer’s musical thinking, it focuses on the perception of sound morphologies that generate from human–machine interaction. This interaction, usually interpreted under the perspective of the devices and technological innovation, will be interpreted through the perspective of musical perception and semantics. In the article, the author applies the criterion of ‘allure’, that permits the analysis of the sound object’s sustain and indicates the sound agent as mechanical, living or natural. ‘Allure’ is used as a theoretical framework for the analysis of human–computer interaction (HCI) in music. Inspired by a hypothetical perceptive Turing’s test, the author employs the ‘allure’ criterion as a conceptual tool for an aural analysis of human–machine interaction: aural analysis can indeed reveal the interaction of sound agents through the cognitive mechanism of motor imagery. This approach can be extended and developed in music information retrieval. The author will develop this reflection showing the actuality of Schaeffer’s perspective in HCI analysis. Finally, to highlight the interaction between human and electronic sound sources, the author will consider a case study: the first movement of Traiettoria for piano and electronics by Marco Stroppa.

This article re-orientates Denis Smalley’s work on spectromorphology and space-form through a case study of electronic dance music (EDM) on YouTube. An EDM track and its related YouTube comments are analysed concurrently in order to examine how sound-shapes and sonic spatiality are experienced in practice on the social web. Using Stephen Feld’s notion of acoustemology as a theoretical base, I argue that semantic and somantic ways of knowing through sound are thoroughly entangled. A hybrid acoustemology model is outlined, merging spectromorphology and space-form with elements of ecosemiotics and music psychology. The model is then deployed during an acoustemology of the trance/breakbeat track Finished Symphony by Hybrid (1999). Selected YouTube comments on Finished Symphony uploads are coded deductively using the descriptive system of Gabrielsson and Wik (2003). A larger set of comments is subsequently collected for inductive content analysis, which highlights some wider issues relating to the words we use for music and sound. The article concludes by calling for vantage point shifts in music research.

On reflection upon my own experience as a composer in theory and practice, I find that terms not only define but also propose. In finding words for spatial texture, I have discovered that spatial texture itself is always proposing: motion of sound suggests texture of space. The texture of space creates an elusive materiality. Form is no better than formlessness.

To better understand the function of sound within electronic music it is inevitable to consider the way composers and performers talk about such sound and its different qualities. An attempt to classify sound is a logical consequence of the desire to orient oneself in a vast field of possibilities. It remains difficult, however, to relate such a classification to the intuitive way we talk about sound. Heavily influenced by our individual upbringing, cultural and musical environment and, perhaps most strongly, by our peers in the creation and performance of music, words verbalised in relation to sound and music invite a systematic investigation. This article exemplifies such an investigation, attempting the elicitation and structuring of a vocabulary from eight musically trained individuals in a two-stage experiment. The words examined here are concerned with sounds created by transformation of acoustic sources through electronic processing methods.

This article considers the concept of a ‘language of things’, which Pierre Schaeffer developed in his early work, the Essai sur la radio et le cinema (1941–42). On the basis of a careful consideration of this text, it will appear that the ‘language of things’ engages a specific posture that shows, in the process of concrete music’s emergence, two distinct but interrelated aspects: one concerning things themselves and the other concerning language. It is this knot, this interwovenness, that we will try to understand in this article. The article will show that the promotion of noise is directly linked to the deconstruction of language and that these two processes, which can be precisely identified in Schaeffer’s early works, refer to a fundamental switch, signalling the birth of musique concrète.

Despite the gradual proliferation of scholarly work around sound, and in particular its role in experimental music, there is little explicitly sonic philosophy that attempts to provide a ground for such research. Decades after the work of Pierre Schaeffer to theorise the objet sonore – sound object – and John Cage’s (1973: 10) call to ‘let sounds be themselves’, there remain few ontological and epistemological frameworks to support investigations into aesthetic, ethical and political questions related to experimental music practice and the place of sound in it. This makes writing about sound difficult and contributes to a lack of clarity or specificity in the use of terms such as ‘sound’, ‘noise’ and ‘silence’. In this article I seek to address this, connecting the work of transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau, experimental music composer and thinker Cage and philosopher Michel Serres with my own experience to develop an account of sound in experimental music that approaches it as multiplicity. This allows sound to be heard as physical, perceptual and conceptual and brings into question the reproducibility of sound, emphasising the place of sound as part of its environment.

French musique concrète artist Pierre Schaeffer pioneered new ways of listening to and studying sound. His study and manipulation of recorded sounds to create music changed the way contemporary musicians, from a multitude of disciplines, approach making music. Additionally, Schaeffer’s treatise on acousmatic listening to sonorous objects has deeply influenced contemporary sound studies. In this article, I elucidate how musique concrète has informed my practice-led research project, Looking Awry – from which I will discuss two case studies. I outline how acousmatic listening to field recordings from everyday environments informed the development of performance strategies that guide improvised musical performance; a malleable practice that can be applied to a variety of performance settings.

No art form so rigorously organises time as music. Whereas all art in some sense exists in time, music could be said to be of time. This article, however, questions implicit assumptions about the fundamental nature of time to music. In contrast, an alternative approach to the discourse of composition and analysis is proposed in which space rather than time is privileged. Russolo, Stockhausen, Cage and Agostino Di Scipio are cited as historical precedents where the status of time in music is questioned but a more detailed consideration is given to Ryoji Ikeda, a contemporary sound-art practitioner who, it is argued, represents a turn towards the privileging of space in contemporary music practice. This article argues that an approach to composition that implicitly accepts the primacy of time tends to privilege sounds that are more easily described symbolically, such as notated pitched sounds or materials with clear spectromorphological design. In contrast, an approach that places greater concern with the work in space facilitates the greater use of materials that could be considered ‘noise’, in the sense of both a broadband spectrum and signal disruption.

This article examines the early reception of Pierre Schaeffer’s theoretical work in Quebec through the teaching of Marcelle Deschênes, principal author of the first electroacoustic theory and ear training curricula at both Université Laval and Université de Montréal. An account of Deschênes’s educational career is provided, along with remarks on the contents of her early courses in Morpho-typology and her listening workshops for children, using newly excavated primary material from her private archives. While existing scholarship presumes that Schaefferian thinking arrived in Quebec with the ‘orthodox’ acousmatic approach of Francis Dhomont, this article asserts that a pluralist and multidisciplinary interpretation of Schaeffer’s work can be discerned which pre-dated Dhomont’s teaching and has had an equally lasting impact overall. A methodological argument is also made for including education and other forms of ‘reproductive labour’ in the history of electroacoustic music.

This article presents a multimodal exploratory study aimed at searching for evidence that can guide us in the adoption and/or improvement of appropriate theoretical–methodological approaches for studying the role of the spatiality/spatialisation of sound and the cognitive/affective empathic processes involved in the acousmatic experience. For this purpose, controlled listening sessions were conducted in which fragments of different loudspeaker music were presented. The subjects reported their emotional experience and the degree of familiarity they assigned to each sound fragment. Specific questions for the acousmatic fragments inquire into the potential relationships between the sound stimulus and the emotion declared by the subjects. From these experiences, qualitative reports were obtained through a semi-structured interview, and electrodermal activity (EDA) logs were recorded in parallel for an intended group. Based on these results, it is argued that spatiality might be linked to a complex cognitive–affective response from the listeners and emerges as a distinctive element of the meaning that the listeners ascribe to their acousmatic musical experience.

Through a musical examination of The Hands (Movement 1) (1986), this article reveals musical developments of Michel Waisvisz’s early performance practice with The Hands. Waisvisz’s digital musical instrument, The Hands, helped shape the body as a recognisable agent of musical structure; this article details how the instrument controls relate to musical gesture and reveals the physical efforts of the composer through spectral analyses of the sound recording and an investigation of a 1987 performance video. The rich context of The Hands – the instrument controls, Waisvisz’s decades-long dedication to the instrument’s potential and, more centrally, the exploration of human effort in performance – have made this pioneering live-performance system for electronic music stand for more than just a musical instrument. Many authors cite Michel Waisvisz’s Hands technology but few provide musical analyses of Waisvisz’s music. The musical analysis of The Hands (Movement 1) (1986) highlights the art practice of a seminal composer–performer through one of his most important digital musical instruments and signals how the body became an instrument for playing digital electronic music.

How is performing with responsive technology in a mixed work experienced by performers, and how may the notion of embodied cognition further our understanding of this interaction? These questions are addressed here analysing accounts from singers performing the author’s mixed work Metamorphoses (2015). Combining semi-structured interviews and inspiration from Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, questions concerning the ‘self’ when listening, singing, moving and relating to fellow musicians, as well as the relationship towards the computer, are explored. The results include a notion of the computer as neither separated nor detached but both, and highlight the importance of the situation, including not only the here and now but also social and cultural dimensions. The discussion emphasises the role of sensorimotor interaction and bodily experience in human meaning-making.

This article proposes a perspective on certain practices within experimental music based on a particular understanding of sonic materialism. By tracing correlations and marking divergences between post-spectralism, minimalism, electroacoustic music, glitch and IDM’s offshoots, this article reflects on sound-in-itself, the conception of space and time in music, poietics, perceptual and cultural factors, and suggests that there is a particular understanding of sonic materialism – which I term ecstatic-materialism – that is rooted in a synthesis of perception, theory and embodied actions.

This perspective explores a new expressivity of sound in which the sound itself is the point of convergence for creative impulses and perceptual motives, sound being the common territory between composer and listener. By developing the idea of an ecstatic-sonic-materialism, various works across different genres can be brought together according to this mutual convergence on sound that embodies acoustic properties, intimate traces, external and corporeal experiences.