This article presents a history of alternative electronic music education in Melbourne, Australia. It documents early examples of experimentation with non-traditional classes and programmes in tertiary institutions and subsequently the emergence, over several decades, of alternative teaching and learning in community centres, nightclubs, retail stores, message boards and magazines. The article uses Scheffler’s Models of Teaching to provide a framework to document the differing pedagogical approaches, and draws upon archival material, interviews, essays and first-hand experiences to explain how Melbourne’s rich history has informed and influenced today’s learning practices. It posits that the adaptable, dynamic and flexible practices found in Melbourne’s electronic music education were the result of influences from key educators, the needs of the communities that enabled them and the adaptation to cultural and technological changes.

Learning about music, sound or audio can present significant challenges for individuals who are deaf and hard of hearing (DHH). Given the advancements in technology and the increasing emphasis on equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) in education, this article proposes pedagogical approaches aimed at facilitating the learning process for DHH students in the areas of music and audio production. These approaches encompass sound visualisation, haptic feedback, automated transcription, tactics in non-linear editing and digital signal processing. Importantly, these approaches do not necessitate advanced technical skills or substantial additional resources, thus lowering barriers for DHH students to overcome challenges in music and audio production. Furthermore, these strategies would enable content creation and editing for individuals with DHH, who may have previously been excluded from participating in music and audio production. Recommendations are provided for the implementation of these approaches in diverse educational settings to promote the integration of EDI in music and audio education.

Acouscapes is a software designed as a simple educational solution for the creation of soundscapes and their use in the composition of soundscape music in primary and secondary education. The software has slots in which the user must place the sounds that will make up the desired soundscape, allowing them to make different soundwalks by interacting with the graphic interface. Acouscapes allows the content of these soundscapes to be modified by means of sound and structural processing, and includes a recording function. This article aims to present the conceptual and educational foundations of Acouscapes, to describe the software technically and functionally, and to offer some applications of this software as a mediation artefact in educational processes.

Sound and new media arts appear to be both historical and contemporary means to invest in the notion of more-than-human. Although the concept was formulated in the late 1990s (Abram 1996), certain related practices in art works exploring machine or animal agency have existed since the 1960s, especially in new media arts using sound, video, and electronic and computational technologies.

This article analyses the author’s modular synthesis practice through the lens of Simondonian philosophy, arguing that modular synthesis represents a dynamic example of technical ontogenesis in artistic practice. With its emphasis on technical becoming, Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy of technology provides a detailed framework for the analysis of modular synthesis patching. Following a practice-based methodology, the article references two ‘think-aloud’ videos filmed of the author patching on two modular synthesis systems. Tracing the genesis of sound sources throughout each session, aspects of Simondonian technical invention are analysed with respect to this creative practice. As these patches concretise, an increasingly saturated associated milieu is shown to emerge as the driving force behind technical invention. Seeking resolutions between incompatibilities arising between the internal milieu of a sound source and the external milieu of the modular system, the analysis reveals the appearance of metastable states within the ontogenesis of each patch. By detailing the various forms of recurrent causality in these patches, this article reveals how modular synthesis practice can serve as the site for the co-evolution of musical ideas and technical objects; a theatre of individuation that is both more-than-human in its evolutionary potential, and more-than-music in its practical application.

‘Sound, Image and Motion’ (SIM) is a unique interdisciplinary programme in Brazilian higher education, blending visual arts, audiovisual and sound creation. We start with a brief historical overview of avant-garde traditions in Bahia and delve into the university’s principles and guiding plan in order to situate SIM among art courses and its available resources. We explore its flexible curriculum in detail, considering the limitations posed by a new university with scarce resources, and describe the curricular structure to analyse experiences with teaching and constructing an interdisciplinary sound creation qualification within this programme.

During the past decade, embodied knowledge has provided novel important insights to rethink mediation technology, thereby paving the way for a transdisciplinary approach to wearable technologies. Stemming from a phenomenological-based approach and considering current trends in sonic interaction design, this article proposes an extensive account on embodied approaches to mediation technology and underlines the increasing importance of somatic knowledge within the field. It also presents an autoethnographic analysis of my own performance, which provides an original contribution to the artistic application of wearable technologies. Stemming from an ongoing research-creation on musical improvisation with biophysical technologies, the case study emphasises how an embodied and visceral approach to interaction can transform wearable devices into an active sensory-perceptual mode of experiencing, which is capable of stimulating the performer’s sensorimotor metaplasticity. The reconfiguration of a body’s automations through the use of sound feedback is a process that unfolds with a high degree of sensitivity in which the body can be poetically understood as an emergent territoriality, inhabited and transfigured by the sound.

In this article, DJ and scholar Jake Williams speaks with Maria Chavez and Elijah about their ideas concerning education and pedagogy in electronic music. Although they come from very different musical backgrounds, the rationale for the joint interview was twofold: first, they are both DJs who think deeply about their practice and have strong pedagogical commitments; and second, their pedagogical practices have led to them to work between informal and formal educational spaces, across a range of age groups. The talk touches on their views on music education, academia, definitions of success, what it means to be ‘open source’ and, of course, DJing.

While mathematics and technologic systems have been intrinsically developed with purposes of representing and computing problems with a human-centric orientation, they nonetheless can be considered to have non-human agency. Drawing on anthropology and architecture studies, this article argues that the human-based logics underpinning mathematics and technologies does not delimit them as human entities, and that they can exhibit influential capacities when engaged with during processes of artistic making. This idea is demonstrated through the development of a visitor-interactive audiovisual artwork. The software environments IanniX and Max were actants in the experimental process of sonifying hyperbolic paraboloid (hypar) planes, as well as the mathematic equations themselves. This article discusses how mathematic and technologic agency affected the development of three hypar models used in the piece, as well as an initial unused version. It also discusses how hardware interface objects influenced human-computer interaction design. The article will interest scholars of technologic agency and practitioners interested in converting three-dimensional planes into sound or creating interactive exhibition technology.

Since the 1980s, deconstruction has become a popular approach for designing architecture. In music, however, the term has not been absorbed as well by the related literature, with a few exceptions. In this article, ways to find ideological groundings for deconstructivism in music are introduced through the concepts of enchaînement and reconstruction paradoxes. Similar to the Banach–Tarski paradox in mathematics, reconstruction paradoxes occur when reconstructing the parts of a whole no longer yields the same properties as the whole. In music, a reconstruction paradox occurs when a piece constructed from tonal segments no longer yields a perceived tonality. Deconstruction in architecture heavily relies on computer-aided design (CAD) to realise complex ideas. Similarly in music, computer-aided composition (CAC) techniques such as neural networks, concatenative synthesis and automated orchestration are used. In this article, we discuss such tools in the context of this advocated new aesthetics: deconstructivist music.

Within computer-based and live electronic music, the values of competition, power, control and innovation dominate. Women continue to be under-represented in technical roles across production, management and software development. To address this imbalance, I examine how feminist frameworks and values can be applied to challenging the biases that influence uneven gender distribution within music technology development. Focusing on live embodied composition and computing where performative and design roles intersect, I explore the work of women composers who design or co-create bespoke systems that feature the body, reimagining the norms of music technology development while exposing insights about gender, race and body types in the sound and music industries. Referencing the work of Laetitia Sonami and Lauren Sarah Hayes, I argue that their embodied design practices constitute a type of activism that promote the feminist values of human computer interaction (HCI), including collaboration, transparency and empathy, countering dominant audio equipment and software design values oriented towards precise, perfected and disposable designs created in a hierarchical fashion.

Ryoji Ikeda’s sonic composition has often been considered to prioritise a physical, immersive experience of space over temporal musical progression. This article challenges this commonly held view, arguing that the static nature of his work should be understood in terms of complex interactions between space and time rather than in dualistic terms. By analysing a large-scale sonic transformation within his 2005 album Dataplex, the article uncovers complex rhizomatic networks of materials that expand across multiple tracks. The links between the album tracks leads to an unconventional quality of musical time that contains a high degree of statis yet nevertheless presents a non-linear progression, which is created through repetition (loops), variation and re-contextualisation of sounds. The analysis suggests that experiencing the ordered series of tracks in the album means accumulating information and exploring memory within a non-interchangeable process of sonic flow and metamorphosis. Despite the fragmentary nature of these internal continuities, the resulting rhizomatic networks provide a means to understand and even to listen structurally to Ikeda’s sonic composition.

This article maps out some of the relationships between performers and their instruments in live and improvised electronic music. In these practices, musical machines – be they computers, mechanical assemblages or combinations of different sound-makers and processors – act as generators of musical material and sources of unpredictability with which to improvise. As a lens through which to consider these practices, we examine a number of different roles these musical machines may take on during improvised performances. These include running, playing, surprising, evolving, malfunctioning, collaborating and learning. We explore the values of these different roles to the improvising musician, and contextualise them within some broad and historical trends of contemporary music. Finally, we consider how this taxonomy may make us more open to the vital materialism of musical instruments, and offer novel insights into the flows of agency and interaction possibilities in technologically mediated musical practices.

This paper examines Smalley’s preliminary taxonomy of the sound shape and the subsequent application of graphical notation in electroacoustic music. It will demonstrate ways in which spatial categorisations of the morphological sound shape have remained relatively untouched in academia, despite a codependency of frequency, space and time. Theoretical examples and existing visualisations of the sound shape will be considered as a starting point, to determine why the holistic visualisation of space is warranted. A notational system addressing the codependency between spatial and spectral sound shapes will be presented, with reference to its context in Cartesian-coordinate sound environments. This method of electroacoustic notation will incorporate the visualisation of Smalley’s categorisation of spatial sound shapes and ideas of spatial gesture, texture and distribution within Smalley’s composed and listening spaces. This visualisation and notation of composed and listening spaces will demonstrate that audio technologies are imperative drivers in the future analysis and understanding of the sound shape. It will measure the modulation of spatial sound shape properties for Cartesian (height, width, depth) and spherical (azimuth and altitude) across linear temporality, to better represent the complete form of Smalley’s sound shape. This spatial notation will aid the rounded visualisation of Smalley’s morphology, motion, texture, gesture, structure and form. Use of this notational framework will illustrate ways in which a new tool to score electroacoustic sound shapes can inform new practices in computer music composition.