This article makes an argument for the postcritical treatment of the politics of sound art. Counterpointing an autoethnographic analysis of Kristina Kubisch’s Electrical Walks with Seth Kim-Cohen’s critical reading of the same work, I show how a critical position detached from the lived experience leaves behind a wealth of meanings necessary to understand the political potential of sound art. This gap, I argue, necessitates a ‘radical empiricist’ approach shifting the focus from the artistic intent to the lived experiences of the audience and the effects sound art may have on their lives. Drawing on autoethnographic and ethnographic accounts of Kaffe Matthews’s sonic bike rides and Benoît Maubrey Speaker Sculptures, as well as Rita Felski’s project of postcritical reading, I develop a theoretical framework for the politics of sound art based around the concept of affordance. The term ‘affordance’ in this context refers to the possibilities of political meaning or political action an artwork offers to the participants without imposing a particular interpretation on them. I finish by discussing three aspects of political affordances in sound art: meaning-making, uses of sound art and access to participation.

The following discusses the potential of soundscape work to reveal new aspects of our everyday aural environments. Openness to the voice(s) of one’s sonic surroundings is maintained as a hallmark of soundscape works, and also a key component of sound art more generally. Different perspectives and questions are articulated, with a consistent focus on the variety of spaces engaged by both sound(scape) artists and listeners. A case study is presented – a recently initiated sound art project on the part of the author entitled The Icebreaker. The latter is a musical instrument, performance piece and interactive installation made from piezo microphones and ice. Prepared compositions, including soundscape works, are diffused at different moments when one ‘plays’ The Icebreaker. I describe this emergent work as an example of the sort of considerations and negotiations that are at the heart of soundscape/sound art composition. My aim is to demonstrate how sound artworks bring us to attend to sounds we formerly failed to notice, revealing our own reactions to these stimuli at the same time.

When soundscape composers, documentarians and artists work with soundscapes, they are expressing relationships with the world, through their treatment of place, sounds and audience. A number of questions could be asked about these expressions about places, the ethics of these expressions, and the ways in which these ethics are informed by underlying ideologies of sound, of sound production and of sound ecology. One key question concerns a common distinction between ‘high-fidelity’ and ‘low-fidelity’. Are there some – possibly unintended or unexamined – ethical implications embedded in the dichotomisation of ‘hi-fi’ vs ‘lo-fi’ in soundscape theory? Is this really an essential or unavoidable concept and expression, or are there alternatives? One such possible alternative is found in the concept of the ecotone – a marginal zone, a transitional area or time where species from adjacent ecosystems interact. This leads us to an idea of ‘ecotonality’ that might offer a more flexible, less polarised, alternative to the hi-fi/lo-fi dichotomy. Finally, we will interrogate three themes around ideas of soundscape ’authenticity’: authenticity of place, authenticity of production and authenticity of connection.

Musique concrète has become a well-known word and concept. The history of the concept permits us to understand how it evolved and how its inventor, Pierre Schaeffer, felt about it and its impact. The terms have gone through several transformations, the main one being that into the term acousmatique, which implied a change of perspective in the reach of the concept. Today musique concrète is an active concept, not generally applied to describe contemporary musical creation, however embedded in musical thought and theory.

It is common to oppose formalist and referentialist approaches to music. However, in Francis Dhomont's work Points de fuite, these approaches appear complementary when we consider the relationship between sounds and sources. Adopting the analytical approach of the American theorist Leonard B. Meyer, we show how the syntactic flow of Points de fuite generates formal implications through the impact of tension and relaxation archetypes. The piece explores metaphors based upon recurrent anecdotal events – the recorded signifiers of the source. These extra-musical elements define the work's structure to such an extent that they eliminate the traditional gap between formalism and referentialism in music.

We compared six sound analysis/synthesis systems used for computer music. Each system analysed the same collection of twenty-seven varied input sounds, and output the results in Sound Description Interchange Format (SDIF). We describe each system individually then compare the systems in terms of availability, the sound model(s) they use, interpolation models, noise modelling, the mutability of various sound models, the parameters that must be set to perform analysis, and characteristic artefacts. Although we have not directly compared the analysis results among the different systems, our work has made such a comparison possible.

This article describes an innovative compositional method based on the use of a sonic time-lapse algorithm to create soundscape audio montages. The method is based on the superposition of short audio samples of 24-hour continuous field recordings carried out in various kinds of wildlife sonic environments. The optimisation of the algorithm focused on the enhancement of gradual crossfade transitions between recorded samples and the use of variable sample durations as a way of recreating a natural sense of evolution of sonic events in time. Future developments of the project will integrate virtual reality interfaces and environmental education projects as part of the time-lapse algorithm machine-learning techniques and also creative tools suitable for multimedia installations.

Barbara Ballard's ‘carry principle’ defines the core elements of the mobile experience: small, personal, communicative, multifunctional, battery operated and always connected (Ballard 2007: 71). These qualities have ensured that for many of us some form of mobile device has become indispensable. Developments in mobile computing have meant that consumer devices are capable of increasingly sophisticated sound processing, leading to the emergence of new forms of mobile music. If this music is looked on as a new sub-genre of folk music, we might be able to put it in the context of live electronic music-making. With this in mind, this article will ask whether the mobile device has the potential to be considered a new folk instrument.

The phenomenon of contemporary composers reaching across cultures in search of inspiration, musical materials and forms, and new ideas is not a new one, but it is occurring now with greater frequency. Some seek to join inherited traditions from within their own ancestral cultures with new traditions from the West or with new technologies. Some are Westerners exploring traditional musical forms and aesthetics from cultures different from their own. The process of engaging interculturally raises complex issues, at times challenging historical attitudes towards the culture of ‘the other’. The author considers a wide range of motivations for this emerging body of work, surveying the range of approaches that composers have taken, and urges the cultivation of cultural sensitivity. This essay proposes what the author terms a ‘reflective compositional process’ with which composers can explore their motivations and compositional strategies and consider the relationships inhering between materials and cultural origins. Implications for works engaging new technologies are considered throughout the essay.

The concepts introduced by Smalley in the context of space-form (2007) have firmly put acousmatic music on a discourse of spatial exploration, holding much potential for the developing of aesthetics in new directions. This article approaches space from the low level of musical structure, with a multi-dimensional attitude to space-form, exploring spatial texture, a concept introduced by Smalley to describe the temporal formations of space in spectromorphology (1997). Spatial articulation is investigated in the context of granular-oriented textures, proposing a micro-spatial, perceptual morphology – the texton – as an aesthetic approach to acousmatic music. This follows Albert Bregman's speculation regarding equivalents to visual perception in texture, where the theory of textons was first developed by the neuroscientist Béla Julesz.

The article discusses acousmatic textons, in terms of intrinsic properties, the way they propagate in time, and how they organise in distributions to form spatial textures. The emergent macroscopic qualities of textonal formations are also reflected upon in the introduction of a group of textural states, where source-bonded spaces and abstract musical thinking coalesce.

This paper reports a study that sought to discover the necessary aural skills for composing, performing, and understanding electroacoustic (EA) music and the extent of their teachability by traditional aural training according to an analysis of a mixed-method (qualitative/quantitative) questionnaire completed by a purposive sample of 15 experts in the field of electroacoustics. The participants evaluated a list of 50 potentially necessary aural skills, which were gathered from skills described in existing, but insufficiently applied, aural training systems and theoretical methods related to aural perception in EA, and provided additional skills they found necessary for EA. The survey revealed that the aural skills deemed the most necessary for EA by the participants were not regarded as sufficiently teachable by traditional aural training and the majority of the skills considered teachable by traditional aural training were not thought of as significantly necessary for the EA musician. Moreover, among the 50 skills listed in the questionnaire 56 per cent were deemed at least very necessary by the participants, with only 18 per cent of them viewed as sufficiently teachable by traditional aural training. The main implication of this study is a pressing need for further development, research, and experimental testing of aural training methods for EA.

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.

In this article, we discuss some of our research with Local Area Networks (LAN) in the context of sound installations or musical performances. Our systems, built on top of Web technologies, enable novel possibilities of collective and collaborative interaction, in particular by simplifying public access to the artwork by presenting the work through the web browser of their smartphone/tablet. Additionally, such a technical framework can be extended with so-called nano-computers, microprocessors and sensors. The infrastructure is completely agnostic as to how many clients are attached, or how they connect, which means that if the work is available in a public space, groups of friends, or even informally organised flash mobs, may engage with the work and perform the contents of the work at any time, and if available over the Internet, at any place. More than the technical details, the specific artistic directions or the supposed autonomy of the agents of our systems, this article focuses on how such ‘networks of devices’ interleave with the ‘network of humans’ composed of the people visiting the installation or participating in the concert. Indeed, we postulate that an important point in understanding and describing such proposals is to consider the relation between these two networks, the way they co-exist and entangle themselves through perception and action. To exemplify these ideas, we present a number of case studies, sound installations and concert works, very different in scope and artistic goal, and examine how this interaction is materialised from several standpoints.

This article proposes that teaching people how to listen is a central and underappreciated facet of post-Cagean experimental music and sound art. Under a new analytical framework that I call ‘sound pedagogy’, I trace a history of linguistic discourses about listening, from John Cage’s talking pieces to Fluxus text scores, Max Neuhaus’s soundwalks, R. Murray Schafer’s ear cleaning exercises and Pauline Oliveros’s Sonic Meditations. I show how all these artists attempt to transform auditory perception in the everyday life of the subject. A central debate here is whether this more ‘open’ listening should be viewed as a new, cultivated practice, or, more problematically, as a primordial condition to which we must return. Framed as a polemical antidote to our harmful auditory enculturation (which privileges Western art music and alienates us from potential auditory aesthesis in the lived space of daily life), these sound pedagogies are, as I will show, ripe for deconstruction and critique. Yet, more hopefully, they may also open up broader and more immediate forms of participation than Western art music has typically allowed.

Projects are emerging that reflect the growing concern with preservation and access to our electroacoustic heritage. In today's context it is difficult to find the huge financial means needed to facilitate a durable and efficient response to this problem. Some accessible objectives and projects are presented here which could be developed by the electroacoustic community. For a long time people have been concerned about the importance of the electroacoustic domain; the concern should now include the urgency of preservation.

This paper contrasts three composers’ relationships with the ‘natural’ and the uses of chance in electroacoustic works which follow from these relationships. John Cage is well known for use of chance methods as an organising principle in his works from the early 1950s onward, based on a professed desire to reflect ‘nature’ in art. Cage’s close colleague David Tudor presents a quite different relationship to the ‘natural’ in his live-electronic music, showing distinctly non-Cageian uses of chance means. Alvin Lucier, whose interaction with Cage and Tudor as a young ‘experimental’ composer was important, frequently describes his work as having a close connection to the ‘natural’, but shows a third quite different way of allowing this relationship to inform his work.

In some informal remarks I made at a conference in 1979, I expressed a reluctance to deal with the subject of aesthetics, which historically is a product of European philosophy and which remains a troublesome concept for contemporary music where an aesthetic term such as ‘beauty’ seems to be studiously ignored (Truax 1980). In a recent, also informal article (Truax 1999) addressed as a ‘letter to a twenty-five-year old electroacoustic composer’, I predicted that the term ‘computer music’ would probably disappear since in an age where the computer is involved in nearly all electroacoustic music production, this term, which once distinguished a type of music from that made with analogue, electronic equipment, seemed today to be impossible to define rigorously. Therefore, the concept of the ‘aesthetics of computer music’, proposed as a panel discussion topic, initially seemed to me to be doubly suspect as to its meaning.

The use of sound for representation and narrative may go beyond what we might conventionally term musical. Film has gradually brought into focus the practice of sound art as something distinct from music yet existing at the end of a unified continuum between abstraction and representation. Music has gradually been subsumed into the soundtrack as another element of the film sound world, and sound design is often on an equal footing with it. Sound designers are now increasingly exploring the more psychological (as opposed to merely representational) dimensions of sound.

This paper describes the background and motivations behind the author’s electroacoustic game-pieces Pathfinder (2016) and ICARUS (2019), designed specifically for his performance practice with an augmented drum kit. The use of game structures in music is outlined, while musical expression in the context of commercial musical games using conventional game controllers is discussed. Notions such as agility, agency and authorship in music composition and improvisation are in parallel with game design and play, where players are asked to develop skills through affordances within a digital game-space. It is argued that the recent democratisation of game engines opens a wide range of expressive opportunities for real-time game-based improvisation and performance. Some of the design decisions and performance strategies for the two instrument-controlled games are presented to illustrate the discussion; this is done in terms of game design, physical control through the augmented instrument, live electronics and overall artistic goals of the pieces. Finally, future directions for instrument-controlled electroacoustic game-pieces are suggested.