Artificial Intelligence is a rich and still-developing field with a number of musical applications. This paper surveys the use of Artificial Intelligence in music in the pages of Organised Sound, from the first issue to the latest, at the time of writing. Traditionally, Artificial Intelligence systems for music have been designed with note-based composition in mind, but the research we present here finds that Artificial Intelligence has also had a significant impact in electroacoustic music, with contributions in the fields of sound analysis, real-time sonic interaction and interactive performance-driven composition, to cite but three. Two distinct categories emerged in the Organised Sound papers: on the one hand, philosophically and/or psychologically inspired, symbolic approaches and, on the other hand, biologically inspired approaches, also referred to as Artificial Life approaches. The two approaches are not mutually exclusive in their use, and in some cases are combined to achieve ‘best of both’ solutions. That said, as Organised Sound is uniquely positioned in the electroacoustic music community, it is somewhat surprising that work addressing important compositional issues such as musical form and structure, which Artificial Intelligence can be readily applied to, is not more present in these pages.

This article is based on my creative practice as an electroacoustic1 composer who has developed a practice of audiovisual composition broadly sited within the field of visual music.

A brief contextual survey sites my work by first presenting a personal definition of visual music and of a set of conceptual approaches to work in this field. My practice is framed as an attempt to apply ideas and principles taken from musique concrète in an audiovisual domain. I discuss in particular the idea of reduced listening and propose a visual equivalent, visual suspension.

I discuss the problems around reduced listening when applied to concrète ‘real-world’ sounds, and propose that two audio archetypes, silence (or tending-to-silence) and noise (or tending-to-noise), exhibit unique physical and phenomenological properties which sidestep these issues. Observing a similar set of problems around visual suspension, I propose visual counterparts to silence and noise – by relating both to the idea of self-similarity, both temporal and spatial – which exhibit similar properties. In my own work I have found these audiovisual territories to be especially fertile, and to open up avenues for new kinds of sound–image relationships with great creative potential.

This article discusses the compositional taxonomy of music theatre works by Constança Capdeville (1937–92) and offers a way to analyse her music and collaborative processes and also the performance of her work through a case study of the piece Double. Capdeville’s works include different elements such as music, settings (staging), movement, text, tape-recorded sound, visual image, props, costumes and lighting. Documentation for the compositions is scattered across different sources or simply lost, making it difficult to reconstruct the works as they have improvised hypothetical components and idiosyncratic or non-standard notations. Using a type of musicological archeology, I want to contribute to the understanding of gesture, language and communication in Capdeville’s works. I aim to preserve the works, particularly by highlighting the collaborative approach of the composer and proposing ways of establishing a documentation process for these aspects in order to systematise the works. I focus on the use of technology of magnetic tape as both a source of listening (the tapes provide a recording of the entire performance) and an instrument (tape recordings are given parts in the composition of the piece). Technology is also an important analytical tool because it helps to track collaborative creative processes. The iAnalyse software is used to help reconstruct and interpret music theatre works.

This article follows electromechanical technologies through different contexts of electronic and experimental music, sound art and kinetic art as well as through parts of their industrial development and application. The aim is to explore connections between these different fields which are often obscured by disciplinary and genre divides, and which are typically unrepresented by critical and historical accounts. The approach is influenced by the field of science and technology studies (STS, also science technology and society) where technical and cultural entanglements are seen as crafting particular truths, and where the method of following a technology across disciplinary boundaries is found. By taking this approach to identify connections between the areas of electronic music, sound art and kinetic art, new and rediscovered critical appraisals of the use of electromechanical technologies as tools in creative sound production are identified. These positions are then applied to a selection of contemporary practitioners who continue to work with and forefront electromechanical technologies within the fields of electronic music and sound art.

Although the hybridisation of Western and Chinese musics has been progressing for over a century, many early attempts tended to treat Chinese material in a rather superficial manner. This resulted in mere ‘Orientalist’ Western pieces and rather bland pentatonic/romantic ‘Chinese’ music that simply harmonised the basic outline of popular Chinese melodies with Western chord progressions. The use of recent technologies has greatly accelerated the pace and depth of this hybridisation and solved many of its artistic problems. Technological advances now make it possible and practical to incorporate the subtle but essential elements of traditional Chinese music, and of course other world musics, in works that seem satisfying for Western and non-Western audiences. This paper presents a brief historical overview of the hybridisation of Western and Chinese musical traditions, examines common pitfalls of many early attempts, and reviews how these issues are addressed compositionally and technically in the author's recent electroacoustic pieces, Li Jiang Etudes No. 1, 2 & 3.

Contemporary thought is moving away from the notion that the human is a clear-cut concept. In particular, non-anthropocentric views are proliferating within the interdisciplinary area of critical post-humanism, with emphasis on non-dualistic views on relations between human and technology. This article shows how such a view can inform electroacoustic and computer music practice, and sees improvisation linked with composition as a fruitful avenue in this. Following a philosophical preparation and a discussion of relevant music discourse, two computer music works created by the author are discussed to demonstrate a model of music-making that merges composition and improvisation, based on the concepts of cognitive assemblages and intra-action, following the writings of N. Katherine Hayles and Karen Barad, respectively. The works employ techniques related to artificial intelligence and cybernetics, such as machine learning algorithms, agent-based organisation and feedback systems. It is argued that acousmatic sound is an important aspect of this practice. The research is thus situated not only in the frames of improvisation practice and music technology but also within spatial acousmatic composition and performance.

Radio studios including Club d'Essai de la Radiodiffusion–Television Française (Paris), Studio für Elektronische Musik (Cologne), BBC Radiophonic Workshop (London) and others have historically played a key role in the development of international approaches to electroacoustic music. Nevertheless few publications explore the pre-musique-concrète sound-based experimental works of the 1920s and 1930s arising from activities undertaken at radio studios, or the dimensions, properties, implications and impact of the radio medium itself. This article explores the impact of the radio medium on creative practice and argues that radio art is not inherently a subset of sonic art, as it may first appear when nuanced from electroacoustic music practice, but can be viewed as its own art form with idiosyncratic international standpoints and transdisciplinary properties. In addition to a historical discussion, this article offers an insight into the potential for radio art practice to cross-pollinate with music practice and explore new creative territory and hybrid working modalities.

Co-creation strategies for human–machine collaboration have recently been explored in various creative disciplines and more opportunities for human–machine collaborations are materialising. In this article, we outline how to augment musical live coding by considering how human live coders can effectively collaborate with a machine agent imbued with the ability to produce its own patterns of executable code. Using machine agents allows live coders to explore not-yet conceptualised patterns of code and supports them in asking new questions. We argue that to move away from scenarios where machine agents are used in a merely generative way, or only as creative impetus for the human, and towards a more collaborative relationship with the machine agent, consideration is needed for system designers around the aspects of reflection, aesthetics and evaluation. Furthermore, owing to live coding’s close relationship with exposing processes, using agents in such a way can be a useful manner to explore how to make artificial intelligence processes more open and explainable to an audience. Finally, some speculative futures of co-creative and artificially intelligent systems and what opportunities they might afford the live coder are discussed.

Originally designed by Xenakis to free him from traditional music notation while allowing a faithful execution of his musical thought, UPIC (Unité Polyagogique Informatique du CEMAMu) was quickly diverted from its original functions. Even if Xenakis recommended to apprentice composers who came to study with him ‘listen to a lot of music and write’ (Serrou 2003: 20), this machine, since its inception, has enabled a large number of people to access music composition, because it does not require any preliminary theoretical training. Based on this observation we ask how UPIC, capable of converting a drawing into sound in real-time, upset the perception of musical pedagogy not only in Europe but also worldwide, through the many workshops/concerts offered to a wide audience. Exchanges and emulation around this invention are discussed as well.

After describing the technical development of this tool and, by extension, Xenakis's pedagogical thinking, we will highlight some of the most significant encounters between the machine and the public thanks to many unpublished sources found in the archives of the Centre Iannis Xenakis (CIX) recently deposited at the University of Rouen. We will highlight the pedagogical correlation between sound theory, gesture and image involved in the composition of a UPIC score. We will also approach other software applications that combine drawing and sound.

Drawing on Deleuze’s work about cinema (the ‘movement-image’ and the ‘time-image’), this article explores formal and aesthetic resonances with sound-based music, distinguishing between aesthetics of energy, articulation and montage, and aesthetics of contemplation, space and virtual relations. A second perspective is given, focusing on how listening behaviours may impose a ‘movement-image’ or a ‘time-image’ lens through which we could experience and remember a work’s form. This is exemplified with a short analysis of the first section of Chat Noir (1998–2000) by Elizabeth Anderson.

The Video Archive of Electroacoustic Music, an oral history project begun in 1996 by the author and sociologist, Barbara Cassidy, captures a first-person history of many pioneering electroacoustic music composers, scientists and engineers from 1950 to present. Transcript excerpts from The Archive are presented. Simultaneous with the founding of The Video Archive, the author began composing a series of pieces that draw on archival materials (from within and without The Video Archive) in a number of ways. Some possible compositional opportunities and approaches are mentioned and explored as embodied in the author's Left To His Own Devices (1996), and Crossing Boundaries (2000).

Ongoing development of audio and informational technology has had an impact on almost every aspect of the musical arts. Cultures and subcultures have cross-pollinated through the rapid exchange of information and have metamorphosed into new fields of technology-based art forms, one of which is the integration of technology in Asian ethnic musics. This article specifically focuses on the integration of technology with the traditional music of India, Indonesia, China, Japan and Korea. By reviewing the history of this metier, we explore the various applications of technology in traditional Asian music and its future.

This article is an attempt to demonstrate the relation between appreciation of morphology and structure in form on the one hand, with higher symbolic structures – crucial for meaning formation routines – on the other, and to evaluate their significance in transmedial narratives, primarily in the case of media-based artworks. The use of catastrophe theoretical models to classify forms, their structure and dynamics is proposed, and the question of how these models can give us insight into the meaning that is carried through transmedial narratives (referential or abstract) is examined. Finally, the value of these insights for the composition and practice-based analysis of multimedia art forms is demonstrated.

Reflecting upon Max Neuhaus’s and Alvin Lucier’s first electronic works on electroacoustic feedback, I will consider how their research into live electronic music, meant to be performed on stage, announced a whole other form of creation, which was paradoxically emancipated from the concert hall and essential to the emergence of sound art: sound installations. If both musicians first appropriated the electronic medium for its possibilities in sound transformation, it appears that these experimentations, and more precisely those using feedback, quickly extended into areas other than research on tone and the live dimension of electronic performances. Indeed, electroacoustic feedback, as a phenomenon of retroaction, goes beyond the mere relationship to the instrument: by manifesting itself in the looping of the electroacoustic chain (microphone-amplification-speakers), it straightaway inscribes the electronic device in a spatial dimension that is linked to the propagation of sound. By analysing Neuhaus’s and Lucier’s first experiments with feedback, the specificities of their apparatuses and the experiences they aimed to create and foster, this article wishes to question the role these experiments played in the emergence of both musicians’ concern with space, which is at the core of any understanding of their later works. We can then re-read their contribution to the history of live electronic music in the light of both bifurcations and lines of flight inherent in their respective bodies of work, in order to look into the emergence of a certain art of sound installation, in which the liveness of live electronic music, far from being pushed aside, seems to lead into other forms of creation and specific aesthetic questions.

This article explores possible strategies for appraising electroacoustic and computer music to enhance ‘marketability’. It is proposed that the specific aesthetics, characteristics and function of a work may be more salient features than those of the medium of composition (e.g. computer) to many listeners. It is suggested that the common practice of focusing on chronology, geography and specific schools is becoming less relevant due to a proliferation of home studios, the internet, and an increasing saturation of electronic sounds in new media contexts. On the other hand, aspects of form, mood, timbral palette, rhythmic complexity, etc., may become very useful bases for choosing works for a compilation CD or concert programme. The inadequacies of musicians' discourse for describing such attributes leads to the incorporation of analogies from visual and performing arts as well as a discussion of other possible approaches to ‘labelling’ and the inherent dangers in such a task. In conclusion, it is proposed that the time is ripe for shuffling the categories and regrouping composers' works according to aesthetic preferences, regardless of the percentage of electronic/computer content.

A casual listener may not have the relevant cognitive tools to relate to electroacoustic music as an independent art form. Even music students who have had several years' formal training may not know how to listen purposefully to it. The authors investigate the hypothesis that by engaging in the composition of musique concrète, students will become more informed listeners to electroacoustic music in general. This study describes a teacher and ten 16-year-old high school students who use a digital audio editor (Cool Edit Pro) to manipulate sound and to structure sound events. A variety of teaching approaches are tested. Having experienced the creative process, the participants display a growing ability to engage in higher-order critical thinking skills in relation to electroacoustic music.

The Museum of Music in Paris possesses a collection of 280 instruments from the twentieth century. Most of them belong to the general families of electric and electronic musical instruments, which we will call ‘electrophones’, in deference to the name chosen by Curt Sachs (1940). The instruments are gathered in families so that the whole collection illustrates the milestones of the twentieth century; for instance, the museum has a large set of diverse Ondes Martenot. However, due to its scarcity, the Trautonium is represented by one of Oscar Sala's Mixtur-Trautonia.

Like any museum, we have to encourage the conservation of this heritage. To maintain a large collection of electrophones like the one we have, a specific knowledge base has to be developed. We have been working on this aspect of the project for the past two years. From the onset, it was decided to start the collection with the Ondes Martenot. Our aim was to define a model approach that could also be applied to other electric and electronic instruments. This work involves organising the instruments, studying them in order to outline conditions of appropriate conservation, and determining which kind(s) of restoration should be undertaken.

A first step has been to gather all information necessary to understanding the instrument and its mode of performance. With this goal in mind, we have taken a complete inventory of our collection with the aim of coming up with a first assessment of the state of the instruments and determining whether to allow performers to play them. Thanks to this work, we were able to start taking precautionary measures against degradation; we are now also able to answer many questions relevant to the restoration and conservation of this collection.

This paper documents elements of a research project undertaken between 2008 and 2012. Building upon the Intention/Reception project of Leigh Landy (2006) and Rob Weale (2005), the project sought to investigate audience interpretations for works of electroacoustic audiovisual music and to utilise an expanded understanding of the audience – as active participants in interpretation – to subsequently inform the composition of new works. This project combined three distinct research methodologies: empirical data collection, scholarly research and composition. The composed works were both informed by the results of empirical data collection and scholarly research, and adapted (re-composed) throughout the latter stages of the research in order to explore emergent research findings and research hypotheses.

Interpretations were demonstrated to be contingent upon the individual lived experience of an audience member, with aspects of the work's discourse acting to narrow the interpretative potential of the work. The use of mimetic materials (sonic or visual) within works of electroacoustic audiovisual music were demonstrated to be potentially obstructing to an aesthetic interpretation of the work. And the importance of recognising the distinction between physical signal and perceived object was highlighted within the process of composition and the subsequent testing.

It is a habit to invoke Aristotle when dealing, within the arts, with ‘Nature’ – that the Man–Artist (and not only the musician) would be, he says, ‘inclined’ to imitate. It is true, the history of music clearly attests to the temptation and of the ‘pleasure’ (as Aristotle also says) found in mimesis. We know that very lately in history musique concrète gives a new perspective to this question as well as to other questions, and changes the deal: because the sound objects of the world, of the whole world – the ‘noises’ – that needed to be imitated, can now be easily captured through technology, almost in a photographic way, and then they can be gathered, kept, and finally be composed. Hopefully Pierre Schaeffer, its genial inventor, has, concerning the question of nature within new music, a position that tears him apart, which is paradoxical, uncomfortable, fundamental: that the nature that is so easily captured, he does not want to exhibit; to understand the lessons, the hidden musical lessons, he only wants to examine it. This almost heroic model will only be partially followed by the composers (concrète, electroacoustic, acousmatic, anecdotical composers) who have been working during the last sixty years in this passionate domain. At the end of this article, the sketch of a typology, based on musical examples, tries to clarify the way nature is dealt with, when it appears in musique concrète.

The legacy of Stockhausen's role in developing the art and practice of electroacoustic music is significant, in terms of both the repertory of works he produced for the medium from the early 1950s right up to his death in 2007, and also the supporting documentation he has provided in terms of scores and technical records and his many writings on the medium over the years. What emerges from this documentation is a fascinating and at times significant insight into his compositional methods and underlying aesthetic, itself shaped and influenced by the changing nature of the technology itself. Whereas his earlier works have been subject to close scrutiny in this context far less attention has been paid to those composed in more recent years, involving the use of digital technologies. A key consideration in this context is the distinctive and highly individual nature of his approach to the resources at his disposal, in turn driven by aesthetic considerations which of necessity become embedded in the practicalities of realisation. Thus the study of the changing nature of his techné as new tools became available becomes a crucial consideration. This article examines these issues in the context of Octophonie (1991) and with particular reference to the concepts and practicalities addressed in his use of three-dimensional spatialisation.