the purpose of this paper is to articulate some of the ways in which australian sound practitioners are already designing sound in the public domain so that current trends and practices can be examined, compared and contrasted. this paper interrogates the new hybrid art form, public sound art, and the design processes associated with it as it occurs in public space in australia. the right to quiet has been defined as a public commons (franklin 1993). public space in australia is becoming increasingly sound designed. this article investigates the variety of approaches by sound artists and practitioners who have installed in public space through a representative sample of works drawn from the australian sound design project's online gallery and article, http://www.sounddesign.unimelb.edu.au, a site dedicated to the multimedia publishing of diverse sound designs installed in public space in australia, as well as its international outreach hearing place. works include permanent public and ephemeral sculptures, time-dense computerised sound installations, museum designs, exhibits in airports, art galleries, car parks, digital and interactive media exhibitions, and real-time virtual habitats on and off the web. the degree of interactivity in the sound-designed artworks varies greatly from work to work. stylistic features and design processes are identified in each work and compared and contrasted as a basis for examining the characteristics of the genre as a whole and its impact on the soundscape now and in the future.

A flexible plastic corrugated tube known as the Hummer was a popular sonic toy in the early 1970s. It produces pleasing sonorities when whirled in the air. In this article, we propose a physically informed model of a singing corrugated tube. The model was used in the composition Garden of the Dragon, which is also described in this paper.

This paper presents CODES – COoperative Music Prototype DESign, a Web-based environment for cooperative music prototyping. Its main goal is to allow any user – especially those with no expertise in music – to draft musical pieces collectively, in a prototyping manner. So, such musical sketches – we call them music prototypes – can be repeatedly tested, listened to, and modified, not only by their original creators but also by the online partners that will cooperate in their refinement, until their final form is reached. CODES enables sharing of knowledge by means of rich interaction and argumentation mechanisms associated to each prototype modification, which are also secure ways of providing awareness to this asynchronous collaborative environment. In this paper, we present the concept of music prototyping and introduce the main aspects related to cooperative prototyping of musical pieces, focusing on issues concerning a musical piece as a collective creation of a virtual community. We will also show some usage examples as a means to describe the overall architecture, behaviour and potentials of the CODES environment.

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.

endangered sounds is a project that focuses on the exploration of sound marks (trade-marked sounds). the initial stage of this project was funded by arts victoria, and comprised legal searches that resulted in the listings of sound marks registered in australasia and the united states of america. this list was published on the internet with a call for volunteers to collect samples of the listed sounds internationally. the volunteer was sent a specimen tube with label and cap, and asked to collect the sound by placing the specimen tube close to the source (thereby capturing the air through which the sound travelled), securing the cap and then completing the label, documenting the time, place and nature of the sound (sound mark reg. no., sound mark description, time of capture, date of capture, location, etc.). these specimen tubes were collected and displayed in chemistry racks in the exhibition in the biennale of electronic arts, perth in 2004, illustrating the frequency and diversity of the environment into which these ‘private’, protected sounds have been released. the exhibition project consisted of:

(1) a web portal listing all the sound marks listed in australasia and the usa, and negotiations are underway to expand that to include the eu.

(2) a collection of sound marks in specimen tubes with caps and labels gathered internationally by people who volunteered to collect samples of sound marks in their environment.

(3) a number of glass vacuum desiccator vessels containing a small loudspeaker and sound reproduction chip suspended in a vacuum, reproducing sound marks in the vacuum, notionally breaking the law, but as sound does not travel in a vacuum the gallery visitor hears no sound – what then is the jurisdiction of the sound mark?

(4) a card index register of lost and deceased sounds.

this project questions the legitimacy of privatising and protecting sounds that are released at random in public spaces. if i own a multi-million dollar penthouse in a city, and work night shifts, i have no recourse against the loud harley davidson or australian football league (afl) siren that wakes me from my precious sleep – both sounds are privately protected, making their recording, reproduction and broadcast illegal.

while there are legal mechanisms for protection against repeat offenders, and many of us are committed to a culturally conditioned moral obligation re sound dispersion, there are no legal limits – i can call the police, but the football siren is already within legal standards and still permeates the private domain of city dwellings. the noise abatement legislation is only applicable to regular breaches of the law, and takes some time to sort out, but it does not apply to singular occurrences which, although within legislated limits, still disturb. additionally, the laws are based on amplitude and do not really address the issue of propagation. the ownership of the sound is not addressed in these legislative mechanisms – it should be; if the sound is an emblem of corporate identity, we should be able to choose not to be exposed to it, in the same way that we can place a ‘no junk mail’ sign on our letter boxes. acknowledgement of the private domain is sacrosanct in other areas of legislation, in fact heavily policed, but not addressed in discussions of the acoustic environment beyond amplitude limitations.

Informed by a proposed theoretical framework for the field of interconnected musical networks (Weinberg 2005), I describe a set of local musical networks that utilise novel gestural controllers for interdependent collaborative performance. The paper begins by contextualising developments in the field of musical networks in correlation with development of technological innovations, leading to the utilisations of gestural controllers in local musical networks. This introduction leads to the definition and categorisation of theoretical and practical approaches for the design of local gestural networks, addressing motivations, social strategies, network architectures, musical content, and control software and hardware. Based on this theoretical framework I describe the evolution of four local musical networks that utilise newly developed gestural controllers, titled ‘Squeezables’, ‘Musical Fireflies’, ‘Beatbugs’ and ‘Voice Patterns’. The paper discusses the design and development process of these projects and ends with a comparative analysis of the networks and controllers based on conceptual and practical criteria.

Stochastic, unvoiced sounds are abundant in music and musical sounds. Without irregularities, the music and sounds become dull and lifeless. This paper presents work on unvoiced sounds that is believed to be useful in noise music. Several methods for obtaining a gradual change towards static white noise are presented. The random values (Dice), random events (Geiger) and random frequencies (Cymbal) noise types are shown to produce many useful sounds. Atomic noise encompasses all three noise types, while adding much more subtle variations and more life to the noise. Methods for obtaining a harmonic sound from the noise are introduced. These methods take advantage of the stochastic nature of the model, facilitating a gradual change from the stochastic sound to the noisy harmonic sound. In addition, the frozen noise repetitions are shown to produce unexpected pitch jumps with a potentially useful musical structure.

The network serves as a conceptual, metaphorical, practical and musical force that drives Sustainable, a dynamic robotic sound installation. The piece is comprised of seven autonomous water gong nodes that are networked together by water tubes to distribute water throughout the system. A water resource allocation algorithm guides this distribution process and produces an ever-evolving sonic and visual texture. A simple set of behaviours govern the individual gongs, and the system as a whole exhibits emergent properties that yield local and large-scale forms in sound and light that are visually and musically compelling.

the history of electronic music composition, technologies and institutions is traced from the founding of the state of israel in 1948. core developments are followed beginning with the founding generation including joseph tal, tzvi avni and yizhak sadai, continuing with the second and third generations of musicians and researchers, living in israel and the united states. the institutional and political dynamics of the field in this country are explored, with a focus on the challenges of building an audience and institutional support, as well as prospects for the future.