This article narrates my practice-based research in embodied sonic meditation, as a Digital Musical Instrument (DMI) designer, a vocalist, a composer, a media artist and a long-term meditation practitioner. I define the concept of ‘embodied sonic meditation’ in the context of electroacoustic sound art with the augmentation by music technology and human-centred design. I historically connect embodied sonic meditation to its roots in Tibetan Buddhism and several inspiring music compositional practices in the Western world from the second half of the twentieth century. I argue that physicality and spirituality are unified in an inseparable non-duality form, through sound, body and mind. I develop a methodology for embodied sonic meditation practice, built on fifteen design principles based on previous research in DMI design principles, neuroscience research in meditation, Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow Theory, and the criteria of efficiency, music subjectivity, affordance, culture constraints and meaning making. I then make reference to three proof-of-concept case studies that use a sensor-augmented body as an instrument to create sound and sonic awareness. I argue that embodied sonic meditation affords an opportunity for sound art to mediate cultures, improve people’s well-being, and better connect people to their inner peace and the outer world.

At any moment in the history of a particular culture, there exists a dominant paradigm, an idea in the air, that expresses the way the world works. These paradigms are general and their manifestations are interdisciplinary, first expressed as structures, relationships and processes in the avant gardes of all fields, then gradually accepted as a norm by almost everyone.

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 investigates the recent resurgence of kinetic sound art in light of the relationship between art and material. It does this by studying the history of mechanical musical instruments and kinetic art, the role of immateriality in the history of Western art, and the renewed focus on materiality in the arts. Materiality is key to understanding the resurgence of kinetics in sound art. The first part of this article studies the historical narratives of materiality in sound art, while the second part investigates materiality in my own works as more contemporary examples. Here the text turns to exploration of the material and acoustic properties of metal rods and plates, and suggests that direct contact with sound-producing objects provides opportunities for new art forms where the morphology of sound can be developed in dialogue with the physical objects and the surrounding space. By examining the underlying acoustic principles of rods and plates, we get a deeper understanding of the relationship between mathematical models and the actual sounding objects. Using the acoustic model with basic input parameters enables us to explore the timbral possibilities of the sound objects. This allows us to shape the spectrum of acoustic sound objects with great attention to detail, and makes models from spectromorphology relevant during the construction of the objects. The physical production of sound objects becomes both spectral composition and shaping of spatial objects. This highlights the importance of knowledge of both materials and acoustic principles, and questions the traditional perception of sound art and music as immaterial art forms.

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.

The author reflects on the past decades with reference to predictions of several paradigm shifts offered in the 1990s, including a broad range of issues covering acoustics, psychoacoustics, the role of the composer, compositional models, environmental sound perception, soundscape composition, and the integration of music and context. Contemporary developments that were not predicted, such as the proliferation of compressed audio, the rapid development of sound studies, the elimination of electroacoustic music from state-funded broadcasting, and the proliferation of mobile listening and online sound databases, are also discussed.

Communicative contract analysis constructs an analytic methodology, taking musical semiotics as a theoretical basis, to look at the ways in which pieces of popular music define themselves generically, and how they make reference to other genres. By taking the different components of a sound as referential to parent genres or foreign genres, one can tease out these references in hybrid musical forms. The method is then applied to three contemporary works, The Kaiser Chiefs' Ruby, Hadouken!'s That Boy, That Girl and Bjork's Joga, and the pertinent issues raised in these works are discussed.

This paper presents a process-based approach to considering workshops as a route to participation in collective creative musical practice. We evoke the notion of the Music One Participates In, which focuses on a shift from the listener-as-consumer to participant-actor actively engaged in sound perception and production. We look at the range of different methods that make up the term ‘workshop’, as well as emergent relationships between facilitator and participant in creative do-it-yourself activities to frame our discussion of participatory music practice. We then examine the nature of participation across a range of disciplines from social and cognitive science through human computer interaction to radical and contemporary art, and identify possible contradictions in horizontal utopian organisational models. With this conceptual frame as a backdrop, we present four types of workshop that we have conducted across time at different sites with diverse groups of participants. We apply concepts from the participation literature to analyse our music workshops, and attempt to reconcile the potentially diverging agendas of facilitator and participant to arrive at a process-based view of ‘workshopping’.

This paper investigates how a contemporary constructed mechanical musical instrument driven by a steam engine can be used as an instrument that brings new knowledge and understanding to rudimentary conditions regarding electronic music. The investigation takes its starting point in the media archaeological repairman that digs out the malfunctioning music machine and gives the material physicality a pivotal role, in contrast to the otherwise more symbolic understanding of electronic music that seems to be predominant. This alternative conceptualisation of electronic music focuses on rudimentary understandings of physical and symbolic framings of machine-based music, which are unfolded through the notion of operative technology, and brings new knowledge regarding key epistemological issues regarding timing, malfunction and operation within electronic and machine-based music.

Since the 1950s the spatiality of sound has become a key concept in different fields of artistic practice, emerging as one of the most relevant subjects in the contemporary arts. Ideas related to sound and space have been used in different discourses and practices to refer to or to explore perceptually different facets of the spatiality of sound. In the field of fine art they have been associated with the emergence of sound art, while in music, they have been associated with spatial music. In spite of this widespread interest in sound and space, the uses of spatial concepts in relation to sound and music have been inconsistent, with different authors and practitioners referring to different aspects of the complex relationship between the two. In this article I suggest a typology with five categories to describe five meanings of space I identified in the recent literature of music and sound art: metaphor, acoustic space, sound spatialisation, reference and location. With this typology I expect to clarify the contemporary uses of space and spatial concepts in music and sound art.

Sonification presents some challenges in communicating information, particularly because of the large difference between possible data to sound mappings and cognitively valid mappings. It is an information transmission process which can be described through the Shannon-Weaver Theory of Mathematical Communication. Musical borrowing is proposed as a method in sonification which can aid the information transmission process as the composer’s and listener’s shared musical knowledge is used. This article describes the compositional process of Wasgiischwashäsch (2017) which uses Rossini’s William Tell Overture (1829) to sonify datasets relating to climate change in Switzerland. It concludes that the familiarity of audiences with the original piece, and the humorous effect produced by the distortion of a well-known piece, contribute to a more effective transmission process.

Analysis–resynthesis (A–R) systems gain their flexibility for creative transformation of sound by representing sound as a set of musically useful features. The analysis process extracts these features from the time domain signal by means of a time–frequency representation (TFR). The TFR provides an intermediate representation of sound that must make the features accessible and measurable to the rest of the analysis. Until very recently, the short-time Fourier transform (STFT) has been the obvious choice for time–frequency representation, despite its limitations in terms of resolution. Recent and ongoing developments are providing several alternative schemes that allow for a more considered choice of TFR. This paper reviews these contemporary approaches in comparison with the more classical ones and with reference to their applicability, merits and shortcomings for application to sound analysis. (Where they have been successfully applied, details are provided.) The techniques reviewed include linear, bilinear and higher-order spectra, nonparametric and parametric methods and some sound-model-specific TFRs.

Inspired by Denis Smalley's theoretical ideas on spectromorphology and Albert Bregman's (1990) auditory scene analysis, I began an investigation into the formation and segregation of timescales1 in electroacoustic music. This research inevitably led me to an exploration of the factors that shape our perception of time passing and estimation of durations, where spectromorphological issues intermingle with extra-musical associations, autobiographical experiences, emotional responses, and the surrounding environment at the time of listening. Ultimately, time perception affects the structural balance of a composition. This paper, which is part of my ongoing research, examines how the perception of time is affected by the semantic meaning and the spectromorphological characteristics of sound events.

This article is a development, refinement and expansion of a paper presented at the Electroacoustic Music Studies Conference, 2007 (EMS07). It aims to provide a framework and terminology for the discussion, analysis and creation of music that articulates mimetic discourse and structure. In doing so, it also intends to enable parallel and complementary analytical approaches to those concerned with the aural and spatial aspects of musical articulation. It proposes the notion of multidimensional mimetic space, taking as its point of departure Emmerson's Language Grid (Emmerson 1986), and constructing additional axes representing compositional continua, similar in function to those proposed by spectromorphology (Smalley 1986), but applicable to mimetic material. The argument considers the mimetic implications of both purely acousmatic music and works that combine the acousmatic with live performance. After a brief consideration of the relationship between mimetic space and space-form (Smalley 2007a), the discussion concludes with a perspective on narrative as a component of mimetic space; providing an extensive discussion of issues pertinent to the idea of signifier space, which was originally introduced in the preceding paper.

Informed by a proposed theoretical framework for the field of interconnected musical networks (Weinberg 2005), I describe a set of local musical networks that utilise novel gestural controllers for interdependent collaborative performance. The paper begins by contextualising developments in the field of musical networks in correlation with development of technological innovations, leading to the utilisations of gestural controllers in local musical networks. This introduction leads to the definition and categorisation of theoretical and practical approaches for the design of local gestural networks, addressing motivations, social strategies, network architectures, musical content, and control software and hardware. Based on this theoretical framework I describe the evolution of four local musical networks that utilise newly developed gestural controllers, titled ‘Squeezables’, ‘Musical Fireflies’, ‘Beatbugs’ and ‘Voice Patterns’. The paper discusses the design and development process of these projects and ends with a comparative analysis of the networks and controllers based on conceptual and practical criteria.

A comparison is made between two systems of real-time sample selection using timbral proximity that has relevance for live performance. Sound files in large sample libraries are analysed for audio features (amplitude RMS, spectral centroid, spectral flatness, and spectral energy using a Bark auditory modeller), and this data is statistically analysed and stored. Two methods of organisation are described: the first uses fuzzy logic to rate sample similarity, the second uses a self-organising map. The benefits and detriments of each method are described.

Software packages developed for visualising time-varying timbres, finding parameter settings for modelling acoustic instrument tones, and for synthesising timbres are described. The sndan package, written in C for Unix machines, provides spectrum analysis, pitch tracking, spectrum display, parameter modification, and additive synthesis. Other programs that estimate the best possible parameters for recreating acoustic sounds using techniques such as multiple FM and wavetable synthesis and extended nonlinear/filter synthesis are outlined. Hybrid instruments created by fashioning sounds out of the recombined spectral characteristics of two or more very different tones are also presented.

This issue of Organised Sound focuses on mapping in computer music. Unlike many issues of the journal, all articles in this edition are related to the theme. The call for contributions resulted in a significant collection of work which covered a broad range of activity in the field. This number of articles would normally fill more than one issue of the journal but we decided to keep the collection together as a representative body of work.

We were delighted to welcome Marcelo Wanderley as Guest Editor for this issue. I would like to thank him for his hard and diligent work throughout the preparation of this issue.

This article documents the processes behind our distributed musical instrument, Ambiguous Devices. The project is motivated by our mutual desire to explore disruptive forms of networked musical interactions in an attempt to challenge and extend our practices as improvisers and instrument makers. We begin by describing the early design stage of our performance ecosystem, followed by a technical description of how the system functions with examples from our public performances and installations. We then situate our work within a genealogy of human–machine improvisation, while highlighting specific values that continue to motivate our artistic approach. These practical accounts inform our discussion of tactility, proximity, effort, friction and other attributes that have shaped our strategies for designing musical interactions. The positive role of ambiguity is elaborated in relation to distributed agency. Finally, we employ the concept of ‘feedthrough’ as a way of understanding the co-constitutive behaviour of communication networks, assemblages and performers.