The medium and genre of the mixtape, a form dependent upon borrowed, repurposed and re-contextualised sonic material, has recently re-emerged as a vital component of contemporary commercial and creative music culture. This article suggests that analysis of the mixtape’s history and ethos can provide useful insight into ongoing tensions between cultures of active and passive listening, questions of ownership with regard to recorded sound and between the roles of producer and consumer within contemporary audio culture. It also proposes, via reference to relevant contemporary works, that the mixtape may now be considered a vital hybrid creative form, part composition/part compilation, with which composers, producers and sonic artists may actively engage. It historically and culturally contextualises this form, placing it within a lineage of military, political, creative and commercial conflict, which, among recorded sound technologies, is unique to tape and shows that the mixtape may be seen as an expression or utilisation of these factors. Consistent commercial and industrial efforts to suppress tape’s subversive qualities are outlined as are creative methodologies which have been adopted to resist such efforts. Contemporary music industry strategies to channel and commodify the aura and ethos of the mixtape as forerunner of the curated playlists vital to its current business model are detailed and contemporary cassette culture is considered as an alternative inheritor of the mixtape’s legacy and as alternative model for future musical creation and distribution. Finally, a set of characteristics which distinguish the mixtape as a creative form are identified and their potential application and implications are discussed.

An interview is a strange format for a research review; however, it is sometimes a quick and effective way to present a problematic. In this case, Christian Zanési interviewed by Évelyne Gayou gives a perspective of the future activities of the GRM from an institutional perspective as well as in relation with the new electronic tendencies, thus answering the major question of the social function of a research and production institution today.

Public art invariably involves the drawing of individuals into the roles of audience and participant by virtue of it being in the public domain – in public places where those individuals are getting on with their everyday lives. As such, a large proportion of the ‘audience’ is an unwitting one, subjected to the art rather than subscribing to it. This is equally true of public sound art, where response to an intervention may vary from engagement to non-engagement to indifference to unawareness, along with a variety of transitional states between. This essay seeks to investigate this ambiguous territory in public sound art, proposing it both as an area rich in possibility for creative exploration and as a means by which artists may reveal and encourage sensitivity to the existing characteristics of a site (thus accommodating the pursuit of agendas relating to acoustic ecology). In particular it investigates and presents a case for the use of lowercase strategies in sound art as ways in which the public might be invited into a dialogue with works (invitation rather than imposition) and thus empowered as partakers of public sound art.

Much electroacoustic music composition and sound art, and the commentary that surrounds them, is locked into a materialist sound-object mindset in which the hierarchical organisation of sonic events, especially those developed through abstraction, are considered antithetical to sounds ‘being themselves’. This article argues that musical sounds are not just material objects, and that musical notations, on paper or in computer code, are not just symbolic abstractions, but instructions for embodied actions. When notation is employed computationally to control resonance and gestural actuators at multiple acoustic, psychoacoustic and conceptual levels of music form, vibrant sonic morphologies may emerge from the quantum-like boundaries between them. In order to achieve that result, it is necessary to replace our primary focus of compositional attention from the Digital Audio Workstation sound transformation tools currently in vogue, with those that support algorithmic thinking at all levels of compositional design.

This article discusses the use of an accessible visual notation system that represents the melodic component of an electronic music composition in acid house music, based on programming the Roland TB-303 bassline synthesiser’s sequencer. This notation system can be used for sharing, composition, collaboration and archival purposes. This system is called an acid pattern. The article analyses a variety of different approaches to communicate acid patterns. It examines the requirements and visual elements used and how they relate directly to the functionality of the Roland TB-303’s sequencer. Through content analysis of images, text and audio data gathered from various music community websites this article furthers the understanding of how the practices and cultures of acid house music composition, notation and archiving are shared online and how they, enabled by web-based technologies, can build communities. This article suggests important possibilities for communities of practice-based around a shared cultural identity, accessible notation systems, and the creation and recreation of music in both online and offline contexts.

This article attempts to place the dynamic of popular electronic music, evident since the late 1970s and extending to the current situation, at the forefront of developing both a strategy of critique and a medium for critical reflection. The genres covered include electronic music in and around the time of punk rock, subsequent moves to the forcing ground of pop music with the era of synth-pop, the dynamic upheavals created through the surging form of techno, up to the prevalent genres of micro-sound and electronica. The essence of both the body of critique formulated by the music, and the critical reflection of such critique (as developed in works when a genre of music is said to have ‘passed’) is not pinned to a rigid model of assessment. Instead, the strength of popular music's ability to strategise and conduct a critique is considered in the self-same music's ability to subvert the definition and ‘metric spaces’ of critique as accumulated through previous genres.

This article describes the potential of apps as a platform for composers of electroacoustic music to present their work. It traces a history of changing concepts of structure in music from objects and symmetrical forms to dynamic systems that provide a basis for interactive instruments. Early examples of interactive instruments are presented and discussed. The opening up of music to all sounds is discussed in the context of the origins and growth of global communities within the music world. The structure of an app format for electroacoustic compositions is described and examples of various music apps are discussed from the perspective of the electroacoustic app format.

In the early 1970s, you could have gone to Trevor Wishart's front garden on St Mary's in York and found huge slabs of steel sheeting. You could have walked into the Lyons Concert Hall of York University and found him and several other people using 20′ scaffolding poles as trumpets (now that's a great sound!). While I was still in the States in 1969, I made a 3′ diameter red gong from the hood of a truck ( = bonnet of a lorry) and could be seen striking a suspended piece of ¼“ curved steel flooring with a sledge hammer, etc. etc. Scenes like this were duplicated across the world. Why? How did it start? Sounds, sounds – the sounds were there, they wanted out. How did they get in? Anybody's guess really, but maybe a clue is what often happens while working in the studio. You've been deploying a sound and then seem to hear it at a time when playback is switched off, then realise that it's coming in from outside the building. The sounds are out there in the environment. We have ears (and other ways of sensing vibrations) and so the sounds have found a way to get inside us. Now they want out again. Composers: they just can't help it.

So, this field we call electroacoustic music is celebrating its first half century, just as I did recently. While I cannot say that I actually grew up with this music, I discovered it in my early twenties (1969), and so I have participated in a good twenty-five years of its development. I have also heard a lot about the previous twenty-five years, often from the practitioners themselves, many of whom have unfortunately passed away in the meantime. With any luck I may still have another twenty-five years, and then you will be in my place now, and I wonder what choices you will have made, and what you will be writing to the next generation?

This article specifically addresses electroacoustic music compositions that borrow from existing musical and sound resources. Investigating works that borrow and thrive upon existing sound sources presents an array of issues regarding terminology, authorship and creativity. Embedding borrowed elements into new electroacoustic music goes beyond the simplicity of ‘cut and paste’ as composers approach this practice with new and novel techniques. Musical borrowings have been widely studied in fields of popular and classical music, from cover songs to quotations and from pastiches to theme and variations; however, borrowings that take place within the field of electroacoustic music can be less clear or defined, and demand a closer look. Because the components and building blocks of electroacoustic music are often recorded sound, the categories of borrowing become vast; thus incidences of borrowing, in some shape or form, can appear inevitable or unavoidable when composing. The author takes on this issue and proposes a new framework for categorising borrowings as a helpful aid for others looking to sample in new compositional work, as well as for further musicological study. The article will consider the compositional process of integration and reworking of borrowed material, using a repertoire study to showcase the variety of techniques in play when sound materials change hands, composer to composer. Terminology already in use by others to describe sound borrowing in electroacoustic music will be investigated in an effort to show the multitude of considerations and components in action when borrowing takes place. Motivations for borrowing, borrowing types, borrowing durations, copying as imitation, and composers’ reflections upon borrowing will all be considered within the article, along with discussions on programmatic development and embedding techniques. At the heart of this article, the author aims to show how widespread and pervasive borrowing is within the electroacoustic repertoire by drawing attention to varieties of sound transplants, all considered as acts of borrowing.

In discourse on the topic, the question of what constitutes a musical ‘borrowing’, if raised at all, is usually restricted in scope and framed as one of terminology – that is, of determining the right term to characterise a particular borrowing act. In this way has arisen a welter of terms that, however expressive of nuance, have precluded evaluation of the phenomenon as such. This is in part a consequence of general disregard for the fact that to conceive of musical borrowing entails correlative concepts, all of which precondition it, yet none self-evidently. Further preclusive of clarity, the musico-analytic lens of borrowing is typically invoked only in counterpoint to a quintessentially Western aesthetic category of composition ex nihilo. As a consequence, the fundamental role played by borrowing in musical domains situated at the periphery of the Western art music tradition, specifically pre-modern polyphony and twentieth-century musique concrète, has been overlooked. This article seeks to bridge such lacunae in our understanding of musical borrowing via phenomenological investigation into its conceptual and historical foundations. A more comprehensive evaluation of musical borrowing, one capable of accounting for its diverse instantiations while simultaneously disclosing what makes all of them ‘borrowings’ in the first place, is thereby attainable.

This article seeks to explore the proposed notion of ‘context-based composition’ by examining the nature of ‘real-world’ context. It does this by studying the way in which listeners interpret sounds, working towards a deeper understanding of what it is that we mean by ‘real-world’ sound and context-based composition. These discussions are then utilised to explore the concept of what it means to compose context-based works and suggests that new potentials are opened up by a closer examination of the definition of context-based composition, one which liberates itself from a concern over an absolute physical nature of sounds and which embraces the use of both abstract and referential sounds. This journey highlights the importance of memory and experience within processes of interpretation and the creation of context-based compositions, and questions divisions between the virtual and the real.

This paper explores the dangers of electroacoustic instruments being lost, from the orphaning of compositions to technological innovations in the field going unnoticed, and presents a case for developing a knowledge base as part of an effort to address these issues. Building in particular on the work of Davies and projects such as EARS, ARiADA and SARA, it explains how taxonomical (hierarchical classification systems) and ontological (more general and in-depth methods for formally collecting information on a domain) approaches should be deployed in this work and outlines some emerging ideas that should be considered when taxonomies and ontologies are developed.

Drawing from the ancient Chinese text The Zhuangzi, the sinologist François Jullien suggests that to nourish one’s life is to nourish life’s vital potential by keeping it open to renewal. Inspired by the anthropocosmic vision of environment improvisation developed by the Chinese musician Li Jianhong, this article begins to explore the philosophical and aesthetic principles that connect electroacoustic improvisation to life nourishment through discussions of electroacoustic improvising practices from China but not limited to China. This article proposes that an understanding of electroacoustic improvisation on the spiritual and existential level offers a refreshed conceptualisation of creativity, environment and improvisation at large.

Starting from the premiss that the central aesthetic feature of non-representational moving images (visual music) is their structuring of reception time, the function of the accompanying music in contributing to the total (combined) temporal structure of the resulting artwork is discussed. A taxonomy of the different roles that music can play in the production and reception of visual music consisting of three basic categories is presented and examples are given:

• • ‘Music translations’: certain parameters of the accompanying music are transcoded into certain visual parameters, the accompanying music thereby provides the temporal structure of the audiovisual artwork.

• • ‘Synthetic structures’: the music and the images provide different temporal informations with enough coincidences to be synthesised into a combined audiovisual strucuture by the viewer/listener.

• • ‘Mutual disturbance’: the aforementioned process fails to be realised due to a lack of sufficient points of synchronisation. As a result the accompanying music will disrupt the recognition of the temporal structure of the images and vice versa.

To create a bridge between young students and senior scholars, the Shanghai Conservatory invited musicians who studied abroad to teach at the Conservatory beginning in the early 2000s. The result was the return to Shanghai of prominent composers. This article examines the impact of this project on electronic music composition and teaching and suggests how these developments relate to the broader historical context of Chinese electronic music. Through an analysis of representative works, it surveys compositional techniques and approaches to sound diffusion and spatialisation among composers associated with the Shanghai Conservatory. It demonstrates how these techniques, which reflect the international training of these composers, are used to express a range of subjects from abstract and philosophical concepts to concrete aspects of nature and human action.

This article explores the relationship of desire and distance in Kaija Saariaho's Lonh (1996) for soprano and electronics. The subject matter of Lonh is desire and romantic pleasures, anchored to feminine subjectivity, represented on stage by a soprano singer. Electronics provide the environmental sounds and amplify the singer's voice. Through Lonh looms a medieval song in the Occitan language, ‘Lanquan li jorn son lonc en mai’ by Jaufré Rudel, a famous troubadour in twelfth-century Provence. Saariaho reverses the narrative convention of love stories by presenting the most intimate encounter at the very beginning. In their succeeding encounters, the lovers move further away from each other. Similarly, in the course of Lonh the distance to Jaufré's song also increases. Luce Irigaray's concepts of love are used for an analysis of the relationship of the loving pair. By the end of Lonh the borderlines of speaking, singing, electronics, language and music collapse in Barthesian jouissance (bliss). The electronic technology in Lonh enables the re-investiture of cultural values, and the construction of flexible identities, crossing boundaries between the self and the other.