This article explores how ‘noise music’ uses its influences, how it refers to them, and what occurs formally, when using influence self-consciously and formally. Specifically, it takes two artists, Nurse With Wound and The New Blockaders, that emerged at the same time as ‘industrial music’, and through different strategies, incorporated visual art influences into their work, to the point where influence as question is raised. Referring to Harold Bloom, the article notes that influence is not linear, nor is it fixed. The article begins with some general considerations about what noise is and how it works when in contact with music; it then looks in detail first at some works by Nurse With Wound, then at works by The New Blockaders. In so doing, it also pays attention to the material presentation of those works, which is a key part of the formal work of these artists. It concludes with some thoughts about how we can not only apply Bloom to experimental music, but that ‘noise music’ can provide itself as a theorisation of influence.

Zagreb Everywhere (2001), a video portrayal of the city of Zagreb, Croatia, is the result of an international collaboration between writer Gordana Crnković (Croatia), video artist Victor Ingrassia (US), and composer David Hahn (US), who collected sounds from Zagreb and together with some of his own music created the soundscape for the piece. Opposing stereotypes about the ‘barbaric Balkans’ often reinforced by Western media during the recent war in that region, Zagreb Everywhere provides a unique view of Zagreb and its inimitable features, while at the same time showing the experiences of that city and its people as having a broad human appeal and resonance. The piece exists in two formats: (i) a stand-alone video work, and (ii) a multimedia performance piece with projected visual images, sound, and live narration. After a brief recounting of the genesis of the idea for Zagreb Everywhere and the main aesthetic aspects of the project, this paper discusses the methods in which the sounds were collected in the field and compiled, how these sounds were edited in the studio, and how the entire piece was assembled. Zagreb Everywhere premiered in May 2001 at the University of Washington in Seattle.

bill fontana is an american composer and artist who has been working with large-scale sound installations since the 1970s. in his installations he recontextualises sounds by transmitting them from one location to another, and uses the transported sounds as acoustical ‘overlay’, masking the sounds naturally occurring in the installation spaces. his installations often occur in central urban environments, and he has, for example, been commissioned in conjunction with the fifty-year anniversary of d-day (1994, paris), and the 100-year anniversary of brooklyn bridge (1983, new york city).

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.

The process of creating computer-based music is increasingly being conceived in terms of complex chains of mediations involving composer/performer and computer software interactions that prompt us to reconsider notions of materiality within the context of digital cultures. Recent scholarship has offered particularly useful re-evaluations of computer music software in relation to musical instrumentality. In this article, we contend that given the ubiquitous presence of computer units within contemporary musical practices, it is not simply music software that needs to be reframed as musical instruments, but rather the diverse material strata of machines identified as computers that need to be thought of as instruments within music environments. Specifically, we argue that computers, regardless of their technical specifications, are not only ‘black boxes’ or ‘meta-tools’ that serve to control music software, but are also material objects that are increasingly being used in a wide range of musical and sound art practices according to an ‘analog’ rather than ‘digital’ logic. Through a series of examples implicating both soft and hard dimensions of what constitutes computers, we provide a preliminary survey of practices calling for the need to rethink the conceptual divide between analog and digital forms of creativity and aesthetics.

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.

This paper describes the interactive strategies adopted during the composition and realisation of construction 3 for soprano saxophone and multiple media, by Tony Myatt and Peter Fluck. This work is an interactive multiple media composition for computer, computer-enhanced saxophone and computer graphics projected onto irregularly shaped screens. Derivation of the performer sensing system and mapping strategies to control signal processing, computer generated materials and communication gestures between the performer and computer are described. These processes include generative mapping techniques using neural networks for the recognition of gestural information and the development and application of wireless, wearable sensing technology. This work is described as a holistic approach to the derivation of performer sensing, data mapping and the application of reactive and interactive processes in the context of the creation of a new musical and multiple media composition.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The HIEMPA project combined a team of people with technical, artistic, environmental and cultural expertise towards an artistic outcome aiming to extend the New Zealand sonic art tradition. The work involved collecting audio samples from the aquascape of the Ruakuri Caves and Nature Reserve in Waitomo, South Waikato, New Zealand; and samples of a variety of pütorino – a New Zealand Mäori wind instrument. Following a machine learning analysis of this audio material and an analysis of the performance material, hybrid digital instruments were built and mapped to suitable hardware triggers. The new instruments are playable in realtime, along with the electroacoustic manipulation of pütorino performances. The project takes into account the environmental and cultural significance of the source material, with the results to be released as a set of compositions. This paper discusses the background research and process of the project.

A composer who has worked in the field of computer music for the last 25 years reflects on how technological developments during that time have affected his work in computer music, instrumental music and hybrid combinations of the two. The compositional trajectories traced here often run parallel to opportunities afforded by the evolution of computer technology suitable for the generation of digital audio.

In discussing different sound environments - sound in the field of art as well as sound in the context of our daily sonic environment - this article makes reference to semiotic theories.

Sound without source. Electroacoustic media shape our perceptive realities. There are multiple tools available to record and reproduce sound, but is it possible to handle the fleeting nature of sound, the escape of sound? Certainly there are tools to manipulate sound, to create new soundscapes in this way. We can generate virtual sound-projecting soundscapes via speakers, via headphones in a new context - but what are we listening to?

Every sound evokes images. The concept of ‘musique acousmatique’, according to François Bayle, amplifies Pierre Schaeffer's notion of the ‘objet sonore’. ‘Musique acousmatique’ refers to sound projection, and thus to our imagination while concentrating on listening. In listening to acousmatic music, we can find three tonal levels, and this tripartite concept of listening refers to the tripartite semiotic concept introduced by Charles Sanders Peirce.

Finally, sound affects us emotionally. In contradiction to the term ‘objet sonore’, the term ‘sound event’ coined by R. Murray Schafer stresses the necessity to analyse sound in its context. It is the sonic environment which determines the meaning of the ‘sound event’. Thus, from my point of view, the concept of soundscape can be compared with Ferdinand de Saussure's semiotic theory about the arbitrary meaning of signs. Signs are determined by their systems.

Semiotic concepts offer an interesting approach to sound perception. Let's listen to soundscapes before sound escapes.