Steven Connor’s book Giving Way begins with a list of unappreciated qualities, the first of which is a capitalised: ‘SILENCE’. Shyness, reserve, withdrawal and holding back accompany silence in a long sentence of qualities, which ‘tend to be marked with disapproval, sympathy or revulsion’, and some of which are, as Connor notes, ‘characterized as a mental disorder, in the form of social anxiety or social phobia’ (Connor 2019: 1). Silence is often seen as a lack of agency, an anti-social and suspect unwillingness to participate. But as a sound artist working with field-recording, I am aware that silence, withdrawal and holding back can also be a form or method of practice and participation. Since 2004, my creative practice has included a series of physical and imagined silent releases. This article draws on these works and their documentation to explore silence as a potential, shared and communal space; an immediate composition that invites both listener and non-listener into its congress. Listening in on the conversation of telephone pauses and the closed paragraphs of library shelves, silence can be heard undoing purposeful agency, shyly engaging us in the anti-social practice of inaction, so that we might not participate together.

Shared music improvisation constitutes a formidable vector for intersubjective connection. Improvisation is a space of non-semantic communication that allows for putting oneself at risk and requires mutual trust and listening, as well as dialogical qualities. This article investigates the intersubjective dimension of improvisation in electronic music praxis, focusing on how the electronic medium can be used to foster mediation between musicians. The article builds on a practice-based enquiry in duo format, conducted in three successive technological settings, with a methodological entanglement of aesthetic and design aims. Systematic video documentation and participant observation provide an analytical counterpoint to an immersion in the improvisatory praxis. A set of design strategies for fostering intersubjective connection in shared musicianship emerges from the research. The findings provide the basis for a dialectical consideration between musical and intersubjective aesthetics. The discussion points to the diversity of social functions of music and their respective aesthetics. Electronic instruments’ inherent plasticity allows for reconfiguring the social space of music-making, and thus opens perspectives for devising synergetic music systems that emphasise an ethos of shared agency over the production of musical objects or performances.

In this article we discuss our practice-based research into effective architectures and creative workflows for creatively coding massive multidevice light and sound installation artworks. We discuss the challenges of working with networked multidevice systems and illustrate these challenges with examples of the type of content that one may wish to display on these systems. We then consider how the structuring of a creative framework can strongly influence how an artist approaches the creation of such work, eases the process of creative search and discovery and reduces the time cost and risk of solving technical problems of architecture design. We take a design perspective on how to make effective creativity support tools and also consider a holistic perspective on creative practice that attempts to satisfy creative ideals grounded in the reality of practice.

This article reflects on telematic soundwalking by initially considering the network as it is experienced in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It uses learnings and writings about our networked lives (during COVID) to generate a framework in order to understand the artist’s pre-pandemic work; more specifically, in the context of a series of telematic soundwalking performances titled A Certain Geography, of which two case studies are presented here. The network is analysed through a diverse and cross-disciplinary selection of ideas and writings on networked cultures, experimental radio, listening, philosophy, anthropology and urban design. This cluster of diverse theoretical notions become important for the creation of a type of networked listening where the authorship of I often collapses into a polyphonic intimacy of voices and soundings affected by all that is taking place in between, including the distortions created by the materiality of technologies, the different layers of ecologies at stake, the words and voices of those who sound and listen remotely and site-specifically. It proposes an incomplete reception loop where the aspiration of walking on a planned trajectory is constantly contested and destabilised. The network becomes a porous space where the I constantly morphs into a convivial-collective action.

In this article I describe the development of a performance practice with a new electroacoustic instrument – the FAAB (feedback-actuated augmented bass). Drawing on a background in improvisation, I discuss how the feedback-induced behaviour of the instrument sets it apart from an acoustic bass and how the implementation of operationally closed digital signal processing algorithms facilitates greater systemic autonomy. In identifying resistance as a key feature of improvisation, I propose the term ‘diachronic mastery’ as a way of addressing the equilibration of sensorimotor schemes in the context of developing a performance practice with a complex hybrid system such as the FAAB. Through a discussion of the term ‘agency’ as it appears in recent literature, I develop a preliminary framework for addressing both the immediate experience of agency emerging in performance ecosystems and the biologically informed definition of the term that may be useful in the design of increasingly autonomous instruments and performance systems.

This article transposes questions about socially engaged sound practices into a more-than-human register, turning an ear to the sounds of interspecies encounters. It takes its impetus from a workshop aimed at forming a ‘cross-species choir’ by the artist Catherine Clover, in which participants tried to sing like, with and to birds in a London woodland. I describe how Clover’s speculative choir was informed by theoretical models drawn both from sound studies and from environmental humanities, as well as a down-to-earth, humorous sensitivity towards the limitations and absurdities of artistic practice. Where much theory associated with sound art and experimental music sees sound as what Ochoa Gautier has critiqued as an ontological suture for repairing the fractured relationship between humans and nature, Clover’s practice offers a more ambivalent and, I argue, therefore more generative means of conceptualising the role of sound within more-than-human social worlds. In particular, it uses sound to draw attention to the apprehension of humans by other creatures and to various dynamics of evasion, non-encounter and undecidability in our relationships with the more-than-human world. By amplifying this alternative way of understanding sound and listening, this article seeks to recast projects of social engagement through sound in more speculative and expansive terms.

This article focuses on critically provincialising some of the ethico-political challenges inherent to much of the acoustic ecology vocabulary and conceptual framework. As we will demonstrate, much of the underlying limitations stem from an adherence to a particular self-transformation praxis (from the ‘New Age’ movement) alongside an overtly optimist and culturally selective outlook on how a well-informed acoustic designer would guide individuals and communities to a better sonic world. This epistemological and aesthetic outlook is presented in order to offer an alternative view on how collaborative works that deal with the sonic can take place within communities. One, where rigid hierarchies and orthodoxies are substituted by an intersubjective listening that changes all actors involved in the process. This is the framework from which we present Cildo Meireles’s Sal Sem Carne LP (1975) and Lilian Nakahodo’s sonic cartography Mapa sonoro CWB: Uma cartografia afetiva de Curitiba (2015–).

Claude Shannon’s 1948 paper ‘A Mathematical Theory of Communication’ provided the essential foundation for the digital/information revolution that enables these very pixels to glow in meaningful patterns and permeates nearly every aspect of modern life. Information Theory, born fully grown from this paper, has been applied and mis-applied to a multitude of disciplines in the last 70-odd years, from quantum physics to psychology. Shannon himself famously decried those jumping on the ‘scientific bandwagon’ of Information Theory without sufficient mathematical rigour. Nevertheless, having a brief personal connection to Dr Shannon (and being extremely grateful for it), I will take the liberty of colouring some of my experience with computer network music with less-than-rigorous insights gained from his work.

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.

This article examines creative sound practitioners who audibly convey social justice commentary through their use of environmental soundscapes as source material. I discuss how micro-watt radio pioneer Mbanna Kantako, electronic music artist Muqata’a and audio activist Christopher DeLaurenti work with field recordings to produce subversive counter-narratives against news media and state discourses. I outline three specific sound projects as case studies: Kantako’s aural counter-surveillance of police encounters within the predominantly poor and Black neighbourhood of Springfield, Illinois; Muqata’a’s album Inkanakuntu (2018) composed using field recordings of Ramallah, West Bank; and DeLaurenti’s radio piece Fit the Description (2015) that incorporates field recordings of the protests following the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. I argue that composing with soundscapes of contested urban spaces can function as sonic activism that confronts the oppressive soundscapes of systemic racism. The case studies are examined through the following common themes: 1) the use of what I term aural counterpublics to amplify marginalised voices and soundscapes of resistance, and 2) the radical re-appropriation of microphones and oppressive police and military audio technologies as a means of ‘speaking back’ to systems of power. Finally, I suggest how these case studies convey the need for intersectional and decolonised approaches to soundscape studies.

In this article, we discuss some of our research with Local Area Networks (LAN) in the context of sound installations or musical performances. Our systems, built on top of Web technologies, enable novel possibilities of collective and collaborative interaction, in particular by simplifying public access to the artwork by presenting the work through the web browser of their smartphone/tablet. Additionally, such a technical framework can be extended with so-called nano-computers, microprocessors and sensors. The infrastructure is completely agnostic as to how many clients are attached, or how they connect, which means that if the work is available in a public space, groups of friends, or even informally organised flash mobs, may engage with the work and perform the contents of the work at any time, and if available over the Internet, at any place. More than the technical details, the specific artistic directions or the supposed autonomy of the agents of our systems, this article focuses on how such ‘networks of devices’ interleave with the ‘network of humans’ composed of the people visiting the installation or participating in the concert. Indeed, we postulate that an important point in understanding and describing such proposals is to consider the relation between these two networks, the way they co-exist and entangle themselves through perception and action. To exemplify these ideas, we present a number of case studies, sound installations and concert works, very different in scope and artistic goal, and examine how this interaction is materialised from several standpoints.

The use of live electronic processing to extend, modify or transform an acoustic musical instrument has its roots in the recording and broadcast technologies that were developed in the first few decades of the twentieth century. In the second half of the century these tools were adopted by composers and musicians in many musical genres and have become commonplace and in some musics, ubiquitous. The perceived musical relationship between instrument and its electronic ‘other’ has been discussed largely from the point of view of listener and composer. This paper focuses on the performers’ perspective through reflection on and discussion of the author’s working methods in improvising duo contexts. The author suggests ‘estrangement’ as a term to describe and understand aspects of the performer’s experience of live transformation and discusses how this estrangement might influence the relationship between musicians and the resulting musical interaction in improvisation, and finally offers ‘co-estrangement’ as a description of his shared experience in such improvising duos.

In this article we present the Networked Music Performance Library, which documents research and practice in the field of networked music performance. The library was developed in response to the skyrocketing interest in networked music due to social distancing and travel restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. In this article, we discuss the library’s working environment and briefly describe several similar earlier projects by other researchers. The main goals we set for the library were to collect materials, organise accessible and straightforward ways of navigating the collection, including knowledge from a wider context of time-based arts (theatre, dance and other time-based art forms), and create a community of users and contributors. We describe the main methods we use to find the works for the library and examine the current state of our collection, which has grown in the last year. Through an analysis of the entries’ metadata, we provide several examples of professionals’ use of the library. Current library users include performing musicians, teachers and composers. As the project is ongoing, we outline the scope of our future work as well as analyse several possible post-COVID applications for networked music, which include assisting socially isolated musicians, teaching, travel and new pandemics. We also show how this library could contribute to the development of new electroacoustic approaches.

Between March and May 2020, an estimated 37 million people across the United Kingdom took part in the ‘Clap for Carers’ initiative against the backdrop of the global coronavirus pandemic. Participants stood on their doorsteps or balconies, or at their windows to clap, cheer and make other sounds, officially in praise of public health workers. The initiative was unique in British history, comparable in mass engagement only to certain instances of the ‘minute’s silence’, yet diametrically opposed in the sonic agency it appeared to permit. Drawing on interviews with participants, as well as published documentation and media reports, I ask how this sonic agency was made use of and managed, and to what ends. Charged with the emotional and political weight of the pandemic, Clap for Carers was an increasingly ambivalent phenomenon. While it might not present itself as an artistic practice, participants’ evident attention to sonic materiality justifies approaching it as such. Moreover, exploratory uses of sound and a proliferation of interpretive positions suggested it held some space for the autonomous experiences art entails. While the initiative’s narrowly defined consensus mirrored the pitfalls of some participatory art, these autonomous experiences gestured towards what Voegelin (2019) describes as an ‘echography of the inaudible’, through which a plurality of voices, actualities and political possibilities are heard. In this sense, such experiences of Clap for Carers point to sound’s distinctive capacity for (per)forming agonistic kinds of participatory practice.

This article documents the processes behind our distributed musical instrument, Ambiguous Devices. The project is motivated by our mutual desire to explore disruptive forms of networked musical interactions in an attempt to challenge and extend our practices as improvisers and instrument makers. We begin by describing the early design stage of our performance ecosystem, followed by a technical description of how the system functions with examples from our public performances and installations. We then situate our work within a genealogy of human–machine improvisation, while highlighting specific values that continue to motivate our artistic approach. These practical accounts inform our discussion of tactility, proximity, effort, friction and other attributes that have shaped our strategies for designing musical interactions. The positive role of ambiguity is elaborated in relation to distributed agency. Finally, we employ the concept of ‘feedthrough’ as a way of understanding the co-constitutive behaviour of communication networks, assemblages and performers.

The global COVID-19 pandemic has been an extraordinary situation. Social distancing has impacted the vast majority of people, reorganising society, physically separating us from friends, family and colleagues. Collectively we found ourselves in a distributed state, reliant upon digital technologies to maintain social and professional connections. Some activities can translate unabated to a digital medium, with benefits, such as the convenience inherent in many online shopping and banking services. Other activities, particularly those which are socially engaged, including inclusive music-making or design, may need to be re-framed and re-thought due to the absence of in-person contact.

In Northern Ireland, the Performance Without Barriers (PwB) research group works with disabled artists from the Drake Music Project Northern Ireland (DMNI) to identify ways in which technology can remove access barriers to music-making. Since disabled people are experts in their unique lived experience of disability, they must be involved in the design process, an approach known as participatory design. At the end of 2020, many of us are still adjusting to the new normal, only beginning to understand the impact of distributed digital living. In this article, we examine how the socially engaged work of PwB has been affected, changed and adapted during the pandemic throughout 2019 to 2020, expanding ideas of distributed creativity to the notion of distributed design. The authors formalise the concept of socially engaged distributed participatory design, an approach that classifies PwB’s current research activities in the area of accessible music technology design and improvised musicking. Consideration is given to the impact the notion of ‘distribution’ has on degrees of participation.

Digital and virtual dimensions play an essential role throughout Alexander Schubert’s work, among audiovisual media, mechanisation of performative gestures, stage setting and computer tools for composing. Wiki-Piano.Net, based on the ‘wiki’ peer-production principle applied to the artistic field, is one of his first experiments with online communities’ interactivity. This article investigates the relationships between author, users and performer through the editable website. The intermedia approach extends and reflects human beings’ compositive and performative possibilities. Indeed, a wide range of internet sources communicate with the historical reference of the piano repertoire while also reflecting recent online habits. Nevertheless, the preset form anchors its expressivity to a specific communication, referring to the author’s informatics-digital attitude and a further staged representation. The man–machine dialectics is consequently expressed on different levels, also entailing acoustic-gestural and audiovisual contents. Questioning the authorship principle and generating a non-hierarchical network, Wiki-Piano.Net reflects Schubert’s aim to create a collaborative work towards which he has no control. However, the virtual environment results are strongly influenced by his settings and artistic attitude. The interaction, hence, derives not only from online users but also from the creator and performer through fundamental website mediation.