At any moment in the history of a particular culture, there exists a dominant paradigm, an idea in the air, that expresses the way the world works. These paradigms are general and their manifestations are interdisciplinary, first expressed as structures, relationships and processes in the avant gardes of all fields, then gradually accepted as a norm by almost everyone.

Self-organisation, as manifest, for example, by swarms, flocks, herds and other collectives, is a powerful natural force, capable of generating large and sustained structures. Yet the individuals who participate in these social groups may not even be aware of the structures that they are creating. Almost certainly, these structures emerge through the application of simple, local interactions. Improvised music is an uncertain activity, characterised by a lack of top-down organisation and busy, local activity between improvisers. Emerging structures may only be perceivable at a (temporal) distance. The development of higher-level musical structure arises from interactions at lower levels, and we propose here that the self-organisation of social animals provides a very suggestive analogy. This paper builds a model of interactivity based on stigmergy, the process by which social insects communicate indirectly by environment modification. The improvisational element of our model arises from the dynamics of a particle swarm. A process called interpretation extracts musical parameters from the aural environment, and uses these parameters to place attractors in the environment of the swarm, after which stigmergy can take place. The particle positions are reinterpreted as parameterised audio events. This paper describes this model and two applications, Swarm Music and Swarm Granulator.

Working with dancers to generate musical material has been the interest of many composers since such technologies became available. My work focuses on a particular kind of dance – a fire dancer – to generate sonic material. Working with a fire dancer in a collaborative environment creates a unique set of difficulties with rewarding outcomes.

A catalyst for the thinking in this paper is the way in which the concentrated direct audition of materials central to the process of electroacoustic composition can, in conjunction with powerful tools for the deconstruction and synthesis of sounds, influence the nature of musical relationships that are formed.

This paper introduces the concept of variable-coupled iterated map networks and explores its application to generation of musical textures. Such networks consist of one or more interlinked nodes. Each node consists of an iterated map function with a time-delay factor that schedules successive iterations. The value broadcast by a node can drive the variables and time-delay factor of any other nodes in the network, including itself. Lehmer's Linear Congruence Formula, an iterated map normally used for production of pseudo-random numbers, is explored for its own potential as a pattern generator and is used as the iterated map in the nodes in the examples presented. The capacity of these networks to produce richly gestural behaviours and mid-term modulation of behaviour is demonstrated.

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.

Part of my listening experience has been a coming to terms with a certain set of musical forms that I call ‘flat’. Music in flat form means music that avoids obvious or dimensionally conjunct large-scale goals, points of arrival, ‘climaxes’, sectional boundaries, and the like, and therefore has proven difficult for many listeners. It has become clear to me that this music demands a different listening approach, one at odds with the way music is typically appreciated in the concert hall. This approach is one that composers of music in flat form can facilitate through today's computer-music resources. What I present here is a specific instance of such an approach: my composition Sand, a twenty-five-minute long work for computer-synthesised and processed sounds, was composed specifically to be experienced through a computer-music interface I built in the MAX/MSP environment. This paper explores what I mean by ‘flatness’, how I came to terms with it as a listener, and how this coming-to-terms spawned the idea and construction of the interface. I then discuss the interface itself, the process of interaction with the listener, and technical aspects of the software.

Pattern theory provides a set of principles for constructing generative models of the information contained in natural signals, such as images or sound. Consequently, it also represents a useful language within which to develop generative systems of art. A pattern theory inspired framework and set of algorithms for interactive computer music composition are presented in the form of a self-organising hidden Markov model – a modular, graphical approach to the representation and spontaneous organisation of sound events in time and in parameter space. The result constitutes a system for composing stochastic music which incorporates creative and structural ideas such as uncertainty, variability, hierarchy and complexity, and which bears a strong relationship to realistic models of statistical physics or perceptual systems. The pattern theory approach to composition provides an elegant set of organisational principles for the production of sound by computer. Further, its machine learning underpinnings suggest many interesting applications to emergent tasks concerning the learning and creative modification of musical forms.

Challenging the usual acceptance of electroacoustics as a distinct field of its own, this article leads the reader through a series of paths to show the extent to which concerns and techniques of electroacoustics are shared with other musical and artistic disciplines. It continues with a similar questioning of the usual interpretation of analysis by examining the variety of aims, methods, and characteristics of analytical methods, and encourages an increased awareness on the part of all analysts to appreciate where their own work is situated within the field. Typical concerns of electroacoustics, such as the design of timbral structures, gestures and textures are discussed within the realm of parametric analysis, but allusion is also made to other approaches which examine style and context. Disciplines from perception to semiotics are shown to have relevance for further development of adequate analytical tools. The author does not advocate one particular approach, but rather attempts to demonstrate the vastness and intricacy of the field. The conclusion is that analysis of electroacoustics could both contribute to, and benefit from, analysis in other areas of music and art.

This paper focuses on the infrastructure and aesthetic approach used in PIWeCS: a Public Space Interactive Web-based Composition System. The concern was to increase the sense of dialogue between human and machine agency in an interactive work by adapting Paine's (2002) notion of a conversational model of interaction as a ‘complex system’. The machine implementation of PIWeCS is achieved through integrating intelligent agent programming with MAX/MSP. Human input is through a web infrastructure. The conversation is initiated and continued by participants through arrangements and composition based on short performed samples of traditional New Zealand Maori instruments. The system allows the extension of a composition through the electroacoustic manipulation of the source material.

In this paper, I describe the Pavilion: Into the 21st Century project, a multimedia instrument based on the spherical mirror created for the Pepsi Pavilion – a visionary work of art and architecture originally created by E.A.T. (Experiments in Art & Technology) for Expo '70 in Osaka, Japan. The Pavilion is being returned to contemporary artists and audiences in order to extend the experience of the original to the Internet. The project draws from the fundamental notion of interdisciplinary collaboration and social interaction that was integral to the original concept – encouraging a freer, more participatory experience that breaks down the traditional distinction between artist, audience and artwork.

The majority of composers and scholars in the field of electroacoustic and computer music address their attention to the problem of achieving satisfactory relationships between new technological instrumentalities and the very sense of music making. Reflections concerning the relationships between the use of digital technologies and musical expression have assumed an increasingly important role, since they provide interpretative codes of composers' works and assume an explanatory function during the presentation of new musical pieces. Focusing on the interaction between cognitive environments, emotive dimensions and communicative set-up, this paper intends to propose an analysis of some theoretical statements, which regard the relationships between scientific innovations and the evolutionary tendencies of technologically based music.

Fifty years down the line, the analysis of computer music is still a very complex issue, highly dependent on the identity of computer music itself: the variety of software, the lack of a common musical notation for scores, the absence or presence of computer data. This has led to the emergence of a multitude of analytical methods, including aesthesical analysis, which approaches music from the point of view of perception, and poietical analysis, which pays attention to the creative process.

This study aims to combine these two methods of analysis in order to understand the relationship between technology and the actual piece of music. The article presents a methodological approach – focused on six pieces produced at IRCAM in Paris and at CSC in Padua, between 1975 and 1985 – via an in-depth consideration of Mauro Graziani's Winter leaves, a work conceived in 1980 at the CSC using Music360. The method used consists of comparing data collected using a diversity of practices: repeated listening, the tracing of graphical schematics, sonogram and spectrogram analysis, data listing analysis. An algorithm has also been created in order to calculate the degree to which the software is exploited and to enable a comparison between the different analyses. It is hoped that this procedure will combine traditional musicological methods with new approaches suited to the medium and grounded in a thorough knowledge of computer technology and musical environments.

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.

This article describes the collective experiences of the four composers at Edison Studio, who have recently been working on the soundtracks for two silent movies – four artists involved in the same discipline, working with the same skills and in the same roles. It describes their composition methods, ways in which problems are resolved, the new awareness and understanding they have acquired and the results of work created out of a re-evaluation of individual ways of operating, that seeks to bring together and strengthen the common ground between them.

Encompassing more than a century, music created through the use of diverse artificial audio technologies faces loss: of written documents, of musical scores, of instruments, machines and devices, of functional electronic components, of techniques and of a sense of the necessity which drove musicians to use a particular technology in a given context. In turn, the loss of documents leads to misunderstanding or oblivion. Today's electroacoustic music studies offer ways to remedy the danger of loss.

Absolute (or perfect) pitch exists in fewer than 1/10,000 of the adult population and many claim that it cannot be taught. On the other hand, research suggests that the mechanisms for absolute pitch exist in us all but access is inhibited during early maturation. We here argue that this inhibition can be switched off by artificially turning off part of the brain, allowing everyone access to absolute pitch. This possibility has profound implications for understanding the strategies adopted by the complex networks of the mind. We describe agent-based modelling techniques to understand the computational rationale for these inhibitory processes and to develop new artificial music recognition and synthesis techniques.