Reaction–diffusion systems were first proposed by mathematician and computing forerunner Alan Turing in 1952. Originally intended as an explanation of plant phyllotaxis (the structure and arrangement of leaves in plants), reaction–diffusion now forms the basis of an area in biology which is as important as DNA research in the field of biological morphogenesis (Kauffman 1993). Reaction–diffusion systems were successfully utilised within the fields of computer animation and computer graphics to generate visually naturalistic patterning and textures such as animal furs (Turk 1991). More recently, reaction–diffusion systems have been applied to methods of half-tone printing, fingerprint enhancement, and have been proposed for use in sound synthesis (Sherstinsky 1994). The recent publication The Algorithmic Beauty of Seashells (Meinhardt 1995) uses various reaction–diffusion equations to explain patterned pigmentation markings on seashells. This article details an example of the application of reaction–diffusion systems to algorithmic composition within the field of computer music. The patterned data produced by reaction–diffusion systems is used to create a naturalistic soundscape in the piece cicada.

Pietro Grossi was the first pioneer of computer music in Italy. During his activities from 1961 to the 1980s he devoted much research to algorithmic composition. Grossi’s first experiments in this field are discussed, dealing particularly with three important phases of his work: initiating algorithmic composition at the S 2F M studio in Florence, writing digital programs at the CNUCE Institute in Pisa, and realising a musical algorithm by translating the curve designed by the mathematician Peano into a sonic form.

This paper seeks to address some of the problems faced by those archiving an area of musical practice – electroacoustic music and the sonic arts – which is, by definition, involved with technologies which change and develop, and which unsurprisingly is itself in a state of flux and transformation. Drawing on the experience gained from two linked research projects – one looking at the development of the practice, the other seeking to archive it – it is suggested that the two apparently disparate areas of activity can be fruitfully regarded as overlapping in many respects. Both activities involve selection and aesthetic judgement, both strive for an elusive ‘completeness’ while acknowledging its impossibility, and at a technical level the strategies now emerging for searching and collating information from ‘separate’ archives look increasingly like the strategies used in some areas of ‘real-time’ composition and performance practice. It is argued that archivists of material from such a disparate and rapidly developing practice, rather than aiming for spurious ‘coverage’ of the field, should acknowledge and celebrate their difference from each other, while conforming to simple principles which will allow their archived content to be searched and collated dynamically by individual users, each querying and configuring the material optimally for their own purposes.

This article describes two site-specific sound installations conceived as part of interdisciplinary collaborations which aimed to explore different acoustic and perceptual features of urban and rural landscapes. The creative process involved in the design and implementation of both installations is described, focusing on the organic montage techniques based on spatial and temporal features of field recording methods. Future developments of the works will consider ways of developing further spatial-temporal sampling methods to assess particular features of soundscapes by panels of trained listeners.

With similarities to the emergence in fifteenth-century landscape paintings, to poems by the Transcendentalists and to the more recent 1960s land art movement, environmental sonic art is always context-based and conjointly performs as environmental activism with aims to break down the nature/culture dualism. Nature, however, is both a material object and a socially constructed metaphor that is infinitely interpretable and ideologically malleable based on one’s values and biases. Does the environmental sonic artist acknowledge this? The theoretical framework of this article extends acoustic ecology, first theorised by R. Murray Schafer, to include environmental history and cultural theory – ultimately problematising definitions of ‘nature’ and ‘natural.’ Through this framework, the author critiques the way composer John Luther Adams represents his environmental sonic art. This analysis will illuminate a dialogue that asks, ‘What is self-critical environmental sonic art?’

This paper provides an account and interpretation of Hugh Davies’s electronic music research and documentation from the period 1961–1968. It is argued that Davies, particularly via his International Electronic Music Catalog (published 1968), characterised electronic music for the first time as a truly international, interdisciplinary praxis, whereas in the preceding literature the full extent of that international, interdisciplinary scope had been represented only partially, and in a way that was heavily biased in favour of the ostensibly ‘main’ Western European and North American schools. This argument is demonstrated by referring to a range of published sources dating from 1952 to 1962, which represented the praxis of electronic music as somewhat fragmented and parochial, and to a range of Davies’s published and unpublished writings, which conveyed a sense of the various international, aesthetic and disciplinary threads coalescing into an apparently coherent whole. An interpretation of Davies’s motivations for representing electronic music in this way is provided, which has to do with his belief in international and interdisciplinary exchange as catalysts for the development of the electronic idiom. Many subsequent publications rely upon the data provided in the Catalog, which continues to be, arguably, the most complete record of international, interdisciplinary electronic music activity up to the end of 1967. Some examples are given that illustrate the influence of the Catalog upon subsequent studies. It is concluded that further work is needed in order to fully understand and evaluate the historiographic consequences of the Catalog’s influence upon discourses of electronic music history.

The author examines visual design considerations in the development of real-time screen scores. Such scores are shown to lend themselves particularly well to the representation of non-linear musical processes and the articulation of non-linear musical forms. The author argues that the foregrounding of such scores, through their projection for an audience and meticulous design, draws especial attention to the manner in which such non-linear processes are represented and in turn decoded by performers. While the transparency of the decoding process is shown to vary across a wide spectrum, the central role of the notational schema in works such as these is shown to align them in many ways with a broader interface aesthetics, promoting rich fields of creative and artistic enquiry.

This article discusses the responsive sound installation Reeds. The Reeds project was commissioned by the Melbourne International Festival of the Arts in 2000, and first exhibited in November and December of that year on the Ornamental Lake at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Melbourne. It consists of twenty-one large floating sculptures, modelled to represent clusters of river reeds in immaculate man-made plantings. Each reed pod contains a collection of electronics for either the gathering of weather information or the reception and dispersion of sound. The sound installation gathered data from two real-time weather stations, and produced eight channels of musical output by interpreting the machine unit pulses of the weather data as pulse inputs to Inverse Fast Fourier Transform (IFFT) algorithms. The Reeds project focused on a consideration of multiple streams of chaotic and constantly varying sound. I was interested in exploring whether the sonic environment would remain homogenous even though, unlike a musical ensemble, the control inputs varied randomly and independently of each other. The sound installation was site specific, reflecting directly upon the environment it inhabited, both in terms of its visual quality, and aesthetic of the sound.

Atmospherics/Weather Works is an interdisciplinary project in the sonification of storms and other meteorological events generated directly from atmospheric data produced by a highly detailed and physically accurate simulation of weather systems. This paper discusses the background, conception and execution of the first stage of the project that has resulted in several performances, stereo recordings, a multi-channel spatialised sound installation, and an interactive sound environment.

In contrast to general perceptions of noise as undesirable audio phenomena, consideration of the objective acoustic properties of ‘noise’ and the functional aspects of noise in Information Theory are used to show how, rather than an impediment to communication, noise can aid in increasing communication. A review of noise in music of the twentieth century and beyond shows how this has become increasingly understood by composers, and that the greater use of noise as a sound source has arisen out of developments in audio technology. This article argues that the music of Carsten Nicolai (alva noto) represents a consolidation of this process. The Autorec CD and the track Impulse are cited as examples of how noise is used as part of a new practice in electronic music. By looking at the structural features of the cited musical examples, it is seen how this new practice follows neither the electroacoustic nor the commercial dance music mainstreams but manages to synthesise references to both traditions.

Various algorithmic techniques are available for generating music, many of which come from the field of artificial intelligence, which is rich with potential in this regard. However, the musical appropriateness of these techniques is less clearly understood. In this paper, I will report on a study that aimed to describe the characteristics of two of these techniques, rule-based and genetic algorithms, as they apply to melody generation. The appropriateness of these characteristics in contributing to well-formed melodies was judged by aesthetic criteria. The results indicate that most combinations of rules, mutations and evolutionary selection result in poor or average melodies, but that careful combination of these techniques can generate melodies that are not simply well-formed but in many cases display some elegance and novelty.

This article explores the spatial identities of the flautists in playing Kaija Saariaho's music with live electronics, particularly reverberation and harmonisation. The varying spatial position of the flautists are theorised mainly via two approaches: that of ‘local/field’ concepts by Simon Emmerson, and through the philosophy of narrative identity developed by Paul Ricoeur. The article investigates the flautists' experiences of control over the sound, and especially its most intimate form, direct control, by discussing the relationship between the choices of live flautist and the sound director. The sound result is constantly negotiated by several authorial activities, the contributions of which are closely overlapping and conversing with each other.

Technology influences all art, and therefore all music, including composition, performance and listening. It always has, and it always will. For example, technical developments in materials, mechanics and manufacturing were important factors that permitted the piano to supersede the harpsichord as the primary concert Western keyboard instrument by about 1800. And with each new technical development new performance issues have been introduced. Piano performance technique is quite different from harpsichord technique, and composers responded to these differences with new music ideas and gestures. The multiple relationships between technology and composer and performer are dynamic and of paramount importance to each party. And a true consideration of any aspect of music requires that all three areas be examined. This has always been a part of music, and so these relationships are inherently important within computer music. The difference is that electronic technology has caused a fundamental change for all aspects of music, a difference that is as pivotal in the history of Western music as was the shift from oral to written preservation of music over a thousand years ago, and then also the accessibility provided by printed music five hundred years ago. In computer music, all parties are always acutely aware of the presence and influence of machine technology in both the visual and audible realms.

This article describes the theories and practices of the German installation artists and composers Sabine Schäfer and Joachim Krebs. Much of their work concerns site-specific sound installations involving the articulation of time and space. Their principal work methods and materials are described. In addition, they have formulated a typology of five installation types which they describe using their own installations as examples. Each installation type responds to a particular set of aesthetic and practical challenges both for the artists and the visitors. These are discussed and illustrated in the article. The typology extends beyond the specific work of these artists and can be applied to installations in general, thus providing a framework for critical analysis. Furthermore, the translators have discussed the issues regarding the specialised vocabulary of the artists and the rendering of such language into English.

Stockhausen’s graphically notated Pole für 2 was created for the multi-channel diffusion system in the spherical auditorium at the German pavilion at the Osaka World’s Fair in 1970. The work is remarkable for the way in which spatiality is explored through new developments in graphic notation – both for three-dimensional and sound projection, and to indicate musical imitation and transformation of short-wave radio signals. These two notational systems unite through the synchronous unfolding of time in Pole, and similarly through the spatial structure of auditorium’s architecture that housed over 50 loudspeakers in 6 layers. By using the sound projection score as the basis for the construction of a NURBS (non-uniform rational B-spline) model, each of the player’s sound projection geometries within the auditorium can be transmediated, thus allowing for a visual representation of the spatial design of the work. Examining the topology of the models produced from the work’s six sections further allows for emergent architectonic characteristics of volume, manifold and envelope to be tracked, thus pointing to Stockhausen’s characterisation of design space. The strong connection of the work to the auditorium’s spherical structure also points to the nature of the composer’s sound design as one predicated on the ability of patterns of sound projection to articulate tangible space, and therefore produce ephemeral aural architectures.

This paper describes an exploration of utilising the World Wide Web for interactive music. The origin of this investigation was the intermedia work Telemusic #1, by Randall Packer, which combined live performers with live public participation via the Web. During the event, visitors to the site navigated through a virtual interface, and while manipulating elements, projected their actions in the form of triggered sounds into the physical space. Simultaneously, the live audio performance was streamed back out to the Internet participants. Thus, anyone could take part in the collective realisation of the work and hear the musical results in real time. The underlying technology is, to our knowledge, the first standards-based implementation linking the Web with Cycling '74 MAX. Using only ECMAScript/JavaScript, Java, and the OTUDP external from UC Berkeley CNMAT, virtually any conceivable interaction with a Web page can send data to a MAX patch for processing. The code can also be readily adapted to work with Pd, jMAX and other network-enabled applications.

How is performing with responsive technology in a mixed work experienced by performers, and how may the notion of embodied cognition further our understanding of this interaction? These questions are addressed here analysing accounts from singers performing the author’s mixed work Metamorphoses (2015). Combining semi-structured interviews and inspiration from Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, questions concerning the ‘self’ when listening, singing, moving and relating to fellow musicians, as well as the relationship towards the computer, are explored. The results include a notion of the computer as neither separated nor detached but both, and highlight the importance of the situation, including not only the here and now but also social and cultural dimensions. The discussion emphasises the role of sensorimotor interaction and bodily experience in human meaning-making.

The telematic work instance is a performance for viola and dance that digitally connects performers in Vancouver and Cape Town. The network interface enables a violist and a dancer to simultaneously play multi-user digital music-dance instruments over the internet with music and dance. The composition, design and performance interaction of instance draw from acoustic multi-user instrument paradigms and music-dance interactions in the African performing arts to explore the idiosyncrasies of the telematic performance space. The iterative design process implements soma-based research methods to inspire sonic compositional material with the body and to explore the performers’ embodied experience of sonic aesthetics during their interaction.

the memory machine is a context-, people- and site-specific interactive sound installation. it has been developed as a collaboration between two composers, cathy lane and nye parry, who share an interest in sound, oral history, and memory. the memory machine is an ongoing project which, most recently, was part of the british museum's 250th anniversary exhibition entitled the museum of the mind; art and memory in world cultures.

this paper discusses the background and ideas behind the memory machine within the context of the composers' work. the development of the project in collaboration with the british museum is described and an evaluation of some of the issues around the public exhibition of the piece is given as well as a full technical description of the different elements of the installation.