Hierarchical and other historically dominant models of perceived musical organisation are increasingly inapplicable to new musical processes and repertoire. The next major paradigm shift for music models, structures and concepts, perhaps comparable in importance to that in which polyphony gave way to homophony, may be a shift of emphasis from means of acoustic production and the nature of sound per se to new musical models based on psychoacoustics, cognitive studies and subjective auditory experience.

By comparison to contemporary artists in other disciplines, such as the visual and literary arts, composers of sound-based art and electroacoustic music sometimes appear strangely diffident in articulating their motivations in other than material-based terms, or at least seem so within scholarly debate. Reception-based investigations (such as Weale 2005) seem either at a relatively early stage or understandably inconclusive, with an emphasis on how the listener accesses, or might access, the work. While this might appear a semantic nicety, I suggest that it could be fruitful to proceed instead from considerations of how the work might ‘access’ the listener, via considering diverse experience, rather than direct associative responses to sound, as material that is organised in both creating and listening to sound-based work – and by whom left open to negotiation.

The network serves as a conceptual, metaphorical, practical and musical force that drives Sustainable, a dynamic robotic sound installation. The piece is comprised of seven autonomous water gong nodes that are networked together by water tubes to distribute water throughout the system. A water resource allocation algorithm guides this distribution process and produces an ever-evolving sonic and visual texture. A simple set of behaviours govern the individual gongs, and the system as a whole exhibits emergent properties that yield local and large-scale forms in sound and light that are visually and musically compelling.

The history of music in the twentieth century is viewed as a process of expanding the sonic material of music to include all sound. Technological barriers to the full exploitation of the domain of sound are suggested as causing the process to take more time than it would otherwise due to cultural or aesthetic factors alone. Important historical developments in music over the last century are reconsidered to be, at least in part, strategies for circumventing technological limitations to manipulating and accessing all sound. Support for this perspective is found in the words of artists and composers of the time and in comparisons between the technologies available for creation in the visual and the sonic arts. Sound modelling is examined as a post all-sound paradigm holding promise for normalising the relationship between sound and music.

The ‘technological revolution’ that took place in music during the twentieth century is equivalent to the revolution that took place between the twelfth and fourteenth century, which transformed musical notation into applications of technology related to creation. This second revolution, as well as the first one, concerns not only musical form, but also the social organisation related to music. The aesthetic of sound is the key factor (in all the genres of contemporary music), which is a major challenge for musical analysis. Society is reorganising itself, favouring the appropriation and amateur practices within musical creation. Musical research institutions – and particularly the GRM – develop new forms of collaboration with their audience and contribute to the constitution of a ‘horizontal’ society, based on exchange, in frank opposition with the ‘vertical’ society, based on a reduced number of producers and a large amount of consumers.

Fifty years down the line, the analysis of computer music is still a very complex issue, highly dependent on the identity of computer music itself: the variety of software, the lack of a common musical notation for scores, the absence or presence of computer data. This has led to the emergence of a multitude of analytical methods, including aesthesical analysis, which approaches music from the point of view of perception, and poietical analysis, which pays attention to the creative process.

This study aims to combine these two methods of analysis in order to understand the relationship between technology and the actual piece of music. The article presents a methodological approach – focused on six pieces produced at IRCAM in Paris and at CSC in Padua, between 1975 and 1985 – via an in-depth consideration of Mauro Graziani's Winter leaves, a work conceived in 1980 at the CSC using Music360. The method used consists of comparing data collected using a diversity of practices: repeated listening, the tracing of graphical schematics, sonogram and spectrogram analysis, data listing analysis. An algorithm has also been created in order to calculate the degree to which the software is exploited and to enable a comparison between the different analyses. It is hoped that this procedure will combine traditional musicological methods with new approaches suited to the medium and grounded in a thorough knowledge of computer technology and musical environments.

This essay elaborates a field of general aesthetic considerations relevant to the sonification of data. A set of dialectical tropes are introduced to define the possibility space for organised sonified data: data-in-itself and the listener-for-itself; cognitive support and sabotage; and the Peircean triad of rheme–dicisign–argument. Taken together, these three dialectical parameters elaborate a conceptual space in which strategies can be sought for mapping acoustic parameters to data features, data structure and sonic transformations, all with respect to listener reception. A work-in-progress is discussed in connection with this general aesthetic field, and considerations of the aesthetic space are applied to several works. Finally, the notion of data verité is explored in connection to ‘big data’ and issues related to the transformation of data into information generally.

The highly rewarding experience of electronic music persists throughout our daily lives. Our immediate environments are replete with events that emit sounds that are extremely complex. Electronic music engages with the listening habits we take for granted in our everyday lives, and reveals how intricate they can be. Inspired by such intricacies, I have conducted a series of listening experiments with 80 participants over the course of three years to explore the cognition of electronic music. In this article, I will first present the method and the results of this experiment, including a categorical analysis of mental associations evoked by different works of electronic music. Next, I will offer a discussion of narrativity in electronic music supported by these results and diverse perspectives on narrativity from a number of disciplines. I will then construct a definition of gestures as narrative units in electronic music in relation to events in the environment. In doing so, I will bring together various theories on electronic music with not only the findings of the current study but also existing research on auditory cognition.

Computer code is a form of notational language. It prescribes actions to be carried out by the computer, often by systems called interpreters. When code is used to write music, we are therefore operating with programming language as a relatively new form of musical notation. Music is a time-based art form and the traditional musical score is a linear chronograph with instructions for an interpreter. Here code and traditional notation are somewhat at odds, since code is written as text, without any representational timeline. This can pose problems, for example for a composer who is working on a section in the middle of a long piece, but has to repeatedly run the code from the beginning or make temporary arrangements to solve this difficulty in the compositional process. In short: code does not come with a timeline but is rather the material used for building timelines. This article explores the context of creating linear ‘code scores’ in the area of musical notation. It presents the Threnoscope as an example of a system that implements both representational notation and a prescriptive code score.

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.

This text deals with the difficult task of notating timbre by addressing how it can be classified, synthesised, recognised and related to visual correspondences, and then looking at the relevance of these topics for notational purposes. Timbre is understood as dependent on both spectral and time-dependent features that can be notated in ways that make sense in relation to both perception and acoustics. This is achieved by taking the starting point in Lasse Thoresen’s spectromorphological analysis. Symbols originally developed for perception-based analysis are adapted for use over a hybrid spectrum-staff system to indicate the spectral qualities of timbre. To test the system, it was used to transcribe excerpts of three classic electroacoustic music works. In addition to the benefit of being able to compare the three excerpts transcribed with the same system, there is the advantage that the visual representation is based on spectral measurable qualities in the music. The notation system’s intuitiveness was also explored in listening tests, showing that it was possible to understand spectral notation symbols placed over a staff system, particularly for examples with two sound objects instead of one.

This article attempts to identify trends in non-academic Japanese electronic music related to the representation of identity issues including gender, sexuality, ethnicity and race. Simultaneously, it attempts to point out limitations in Western identity politics which complicate the identification and clarification of such themes. In particular, the Western desire to define cultural diversity through a multiplication of distinct identity constructs is contrasted with Japanese aversions to images of factionalism or political affiliation. It is postulated that the ‘Globular’ identity politics found in Japanese electronic music suggest ways of thinking around Western ideological conundrums such as the tendency to use terms of ‘equality’ (a notion of similarity) when negotiating for communal ‘diversity’ (a notion of dissimilarity). This extends to current attempts at diversification among academic and commercial digital audio producers.

This paper gives brief descriptions of five Chinese flutes: the paixiao, xun, koudi, xiao and dizi, and short musical excerpts with their notation, idiomatic phrasing and typical ornaments. The source material section describes their spectral characteristics. Following a brief description of the previous wavetable synthesis design, an expressive new Csound additive synthesis design used to model the instruments is described. Chinese notation is a convenient Csound pitch input method using Ling Lun's tuning. Finally, several excerpts from compositions illustrate applications of the designs.

The applications of digital technologies in the world of art continue to explode, and various artistic disciplines begin to converge as a result. More artists are working in a wide variety of media while, at the same time, increasing specialisation results in a greater number of collaborative, interdisciplinary activities. The ability to collaborate effectively with other artists is a skill set that must be addressed from a curricular standpoint, and music faculty must engage with colleagues in the other arts to provide students with the appropriate learning opportunities. While many institutions have developed successful models for doing this, information about those models has not been widely disseminated. Institutions that have found this change difficult may face a variety of obstacles, including highly compartmentalised departments, a crowded curriculum, and shortages in staffing and funds. One model for change is presented that focuses on building curriculum and shared facilities, using technology as a means to facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration.

Researching the inside story of music performance, the core of the performative act, is a journey of infinite discovery of self- and musical connection. Establishing the discourse for such an investigation can, indeed, present its challenges. Do we focus on fundamental research methodologies, strive to fit within empirical investigations, or search for new forms of articulation as we choose what to observe and share, and decide what meanings, presences, dialogues or ‘folding in of new substances’ (Schroeder and Rebelo 2009: 137) we wish to pursue in the quest for new understanding? In this paper I will focus on performance for flute with electronics, the influence of voice, and the play with Maskenfreiheit,1 as I investigate performative layers as they have emerged in my own performances of selected notated works. The influence of the electronics is integral to these encounters with extended acoustic instrument, the place of the performer's voice and the ambiguities of projection, through narrative and reflection.

This article starts by arguing that in diverse approaches to electronically produced sound in music of recent times a shift in focus has occurred, from the creation of novel sounds to the manipulation of sound materials inherent in a culture of electric and electronic devices of sound production.

Within these practices, the use of lo-fi devices, circuit-bending, cracked electronics and a resurfacing of older technologies is coupled with digital technology in a process which emphasises the devices characteristic modes of sound production and artefacts. Electronic sound becomes regarded as embedded on a reservoir of qualities, memories and registers of technologies that inhabit our sound environment.

From this starting point our apprehension of technologically produced sound is reassessed, constituted as the crossing of particular conditions of production and reception, cultural traces and codes inherent in the practices and characteristics of media.

This perspective lays the ground for a compositional approach that exposes and problematises the interaction of these multiple conditions.