This article traces the history of the use and reception of field recordings on radio, in France and Britain, outside the categories considered as art or music such as hörspiel or musique concrète. It shows that radio producers had diverse reactions to the use of sonic ambiences recorded in the field. There was an opposition between a ‘Pure Sound School’, which promoted the use of field recordings instead of voice to depict the environment where the reporter was, and a school that privileged voice. If the use of recordings of sonic ambiences was not new, their utilisation on radio as elements autonomous in themselves was. They were falling between categories: they were not reports (because of the absence of voice), they were not musique concrète (because sounds were not modified and were presented within their context, that is, not as sound objects), they were not sound effects (because they lasted several minutes and could be composed through editing), and they were not wildlife recordings (because wildlife could be absent). Sonic ambiences were new sonic objects that took time to digest. This time also represented a listening mutation, and this will be analysed through the beginnings of radio documentaries and the works of sound hunters.

The National Film Board documentary Bing Bang Boom (1969) depicts Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer (1933–2021) teaching seventh-grade students in a suburban public school in Scarborough, Ontario. A close study of the film informs the larger trajectory of the composer’s previous and later writings and compositions over the next several decades, while a deeper dive into archival materials and concurrent productions from Canada’s National Film Board (NFB) illuminates the organisation’s strategy of nation-building at a crucial moment in the country’s history. Together, Schafer and the NFB illuminate Canada’s problematic relationship to Indigenous peoples, places and sounds.

The article takes Boethius’s theory of musical harmony as a starting point, in particular studying the collective dimension embedded in this concept. The dynamics of contact and interdetermination, between humans and other-than-human, are explored and understood as factors co-involved in the possibility of common living. The role of the notions of ecology and economy in rereading the concept of harmony provided by Boethius’s theory is also reviewed. The text then explores a site-specific work that experiments with these issues through the creation of an acousmatic patch that is superimposed onto a broken ecology, showing how this serves as an agent for a reharmonisation of a drought-ravaged river. The article concludes by addressing the implications that a territorially situated musical approach might represent for recovery of the broken link between humans and the other-than-human.

This article attends to the emergence of musique concrète as a theoretical object in Pierre Schaeffer’s writing between 1941 and 1952, seeing it as the logical endpoint of Schaeffer’s quest for an art proper to the radio. In this strong sense of the word, art is here positioned in opposition to entertainment, and as such Schaeffer seeks to separate the properly radiophonic from the impure, mercenary forms that radio had hitherto adopted. Schaeffer’s account of musique concrète follows this logic, seeking to cast off the vestiges of radio drama that remain audible in such works as Symphonie pour un homme seul. By way of conclusion, I suggest that grasping the entanglement of musique concrète with mass-cultural forms such as radio requires a mode of reading oriented not towards formalism or sonic ontology but towards the figure of the text.

Biomimicry shifts focus away from anthropocentric design approaches and encourages practitioners to develop a sensitivity to the interconnectedness of natural systems and their resultant potentiality as musical forms. Embracing the concepts of biomimicry necessitates a perspectival transformation from human authorship towards a reciprocal partnership with nature that stresses sustainable technological innovation in artistic expression. The need to solve design challenges in harmony with a broader ecological context means that biomimicry represents a new form of environmentally attuned sonic practice that is both communicative and interpretative of systems operating outside everyday human experience. This research employs the biomimetic process to unravel and respond to issues related to the development of form and structure at the locus of compositional practice. Furthermore, it utilises these insights to generate new knowledge through the activities of this practice and the novel insights apprehended through the triangulation of science, nature and music. Finally, it uses biomimicry to impact the compositional trajectory practically, extending beyond metaphor or representation, and offers a glimpse into realms that are more than music, more than human.

Based on the theories of radical education, this article discusses the education of electronic music in Venezuela. After a historiographical review of the state of music education in the country, which shows that there is little information on the subject, the institutional life that has promoted electroacoustic music in Venezuela is approached from a critical perspective. This documentary research gathers and analyses data provided by a bibliographic review and unstructured interviews with experts in the field. Among the most salient findings is the discontinuity in the teaching of electroacoustic music, as well as a critical review of the notions of radical education in the case of Venezuela, where the educational system shows stagnation in the face of the global context.

This article explores the Musical Design course offered at McGill University by Mario Bertoncini in 1975–6 in a collaboration between the music department and the department of mechanical engineering. Some of the students independently created a collective named Sonde (originally named MuD from the name of the course). This unique pedagogical experience, influenced by Bertoncini’s understanding of craftmanship in Renaissance workshops, will be presented as an antecedent of research-creation or artistic practice as research, a ubiquitous and vastly recognised modality of research that has been gaining more and more traction since the early 2000s.

This article explores the role of the radio as an artistic instrument. It discusses both contemporary and historical art experiments, namely those where the sound of the radio or the form of radio reception is an important aspect of the final work. We examine the question, ‘What does it mean for a radio to be an instrument?’ And to clarify, we mean any kind of instrument, not just a musical one. To answer this question, this article focuses on the concepts and theory of those Polish artists who have used radio in their artwork, either as the source of a particular type of sound or as a medium that collects and transmits the sound of its surroundings.

This article critiques the anthropocentric tendencies in machine listening practices and narratives, developing alternative concepts and methods to explore the more-than-human potential of these technologies through the framework of sonic fiction. Situating machine listening within the contemporary soundscape of dataveillance, the research examines post-anthropocentric threads that emerge at the intersection of datafication, subjectivation and animalisation. Theory and practice interweave in the composition of a music piece, The Spiral, enabling generative feedback between concept, sensation and technique. Specifically, the research investigates the figure of a mollusc bio-sensor between science fact and fable, as the (im)possible locus of musicality. This emergent methodology also offers new insights for other sound art and music practices aiming to pluralise what listening might be.

As a medium for information, entertainment and communication, radio had taken precedence over television for decades, at least in terms of its accessibility in all households. Television and later the internet never completely annulled its aural condition, while its form altered to keep up with developments in terms of asynchrony or subject areas. Today it is considered the predominantly ‘cool medium’. Recent developments in television and the internet’s ways of operating render it a more detached medium than the alternative, given that a medium can change ‘temperature’ over time depending on the use (Levinson 2001: 108). But what about its accessibility to d/Deaf and Hard-of-hearing groups? Are these communities excluded by default from radio programmes and artistic creation through radiophonic media? In this article I analyse a case study, ‘Tangible Radio – Class on Air’ workshop, as part of B-AIR Creative Europe programme, as well as the convergences of sound art and the deaf experience in terms of co-creation, participation and educational processes. I will argue that radio as a medium can very successfully include the d/Deaf and Hard-of-hearing communities if relevant methodologies and technologies are encompassed to its processes.

Between 2022 and 2023 I ran two experimental DJing workshops in a school in East London with Year 10 GCSE music students. They were experimental in the sense that I had not run workshops with this age group before and that I was sharing some experimental techniques with digital DJ technology (DDJT) that I had been exploring in my own practice. They proved to be highly engaging for the young people and highlighted significant, and sometimes unexpected, benefits of using DDJT in the classroom. The results of the workshops are analysed in the context of the 2016 addition of DJing as an ‘instrument’ for the performance component of the GCSE assessment, alongside claims that this is a ‘challenge to colonisation’. While the addition is viewed as positive, it is questioned whether viewing DJing as being equivalent to other instrumental playing captures the plurality of a practice that is distributed across sonic, social and discursive realms. Historical and conceptual precedents for viewing DJing both as an instrument and as an art are explored, and it is suggested that it could also be assessed under the GCSE Art & Design criteria.

Machine listening takes place through sonification. Sound is treated as data by a computer that listens by deconstructing and reconstructing sound. To better explore the aesthetic, relational and ontological aspects of machine listening, this article reflects upon the Fourier analysis, which is vital for machine learning algorithms. It then outlines the listening modes articulated by French composer Pierre Schaeffer and updates them for the new material conditions of contemporary listening. It proposes that a new mode, identified while working with sonification, be added to Schaeffer’s classic array. It explores non-human listening among machines that listen with other concerns beyond the human need to interpret content. Thus, this article makes a particular strategic move: it centres around machine listening, which enables computers to perform analyses of a soundscape, and resynthesis, a mode of sonification that treats sound as data, to reintroduce the ‘sound object’ nature of resynthesised sounds. It looks at sonification through discourse analysis and media archaeology, and gives importance to experiments in art that privilege sensorial and affective dimensions often ignored by scientific approaches. It proposes that thinking about machine listening through sonification can assist in developing sensibilities that are more responsive to the present sonic ecologies between human and non-human listeners.

Seth Kim Cohen’s notion of non-cochlear sound art explores the idea of more-than-music, reframing sonic listening, shifting away from the aesthetic and towards the conceptual, reducing ‘the value of sonic pleasure in favor of a broader set of philosophical, social, political, and historical concerns’. While this notion holds academic and artistic merit, it does not acknowledge similar explorations in sound art within disabled and d/Deaf communities and developments within disability aesthetics. Works within the disability arts that fit into Kim-Cohen’s non-cochlear sound art were created prior to the publication of his 2009 text In the Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non-Cochlear Sound Art and have continued to develop since. This article discusses Kim-Cohen’s non-cochlear sound and asks the reader to view it alongside discussions of disability aesthetics and sound art works by Hard of Hearing (HoH) and d/Deaf artists. In doing so, it illustrates how disability art and aesthetics are inherently conceptual and sociopolitical and have not only been forgotten in discussion of non-cochlear sound art, but have also carved their own path.

Black and indigenous musics continue to evolve and dominate global markets and cultural spheres, notwithstanding a history of intellectual property theft and cultural appropriation. DJs and producers (by way of sampling or extrapolation) have played archival roles outside traditional music archiving. Colonial invasions and the transatlantic slave trade, as well as academic neocolonialism, displaced cultural histories imparted through oral traditions. The Black radical tradition resists global corporate capitalism, even within a music industry that emphasises stereotypical Black tropes for profit. Without regulation, the practices of museums, the education system and the music industry will be exacerbated by the development of recommendation systems and artificial intelligence (AI). Hence, in communities that have already suffered unjust intellectual and cultural property theft, I recognise and re-centre the archiving musico-cultural role that DJs and producers have historically played.

In 2003, a new radio programme called Radioatelier was launched as part of the Czech Radio 3 – Vltava broadcast, the national public service art channel. It was aimed at presenting experimental radio forms, something completely unprecedented at that time. With 213 new commissions by December 2022, the programme entered its third decade of existence, having won a number of major radio art awards, while facing threats of impending programme cancellation in 2023. The present article is quite personal, offering generational insights of the producer, who was privileged enough to set goals and scope of the programme in its initial stages and who went on to co-exist with it for the following two decades. It also presents the complete list of sound compositions commissioned by Radioatelier between 2003 and 2022.

This article presents the concept of a ‘haptic aurality’ in soundscape composition, an aesthetic and perceptual model derived from visual art theory, media studies and phenomenology that extends the haptic beyond its common association to vibroacoustic phenomena in the sonic arts. Included in this framework are both the standard haptic arguments, from psychology and engineering, including notions of kinaesthesia and proprioception, and varied definitions of the haptic as a not necessarily tactile mode of knowing touch that involves synaesthesia, transmodal perception and philosophical notions of sensory dedifferentiation. In adapting this survey of sometimes contradictory accounts of the haptic as parameters for compositional analysis and application, the article simultaneously creates novel engagements between soundscape composition and acousmatic practice.

Considered as an artistic medium, airwaves are not neutral, nor are they immaterial. The decision to broadcast is linked to the decision to activate electronic circuits. Radio holds both propagandistic and subversive potentials. But even the most experimental broad- or webcasts rely on electronic or digital technologies. Thus, responsible radio productions cannot shy away from a self-critical, and political positioning in this regard. What political implications does it have for radio art that transmission rests on a system of energy-consuming technologies? This question calls for a theorization that nuances the idea of podcasting as an ephemeral and intimate medium. This article proposes the term weightless infrastructures in rethinking satellites as atmospheric, free-floating and free-falling technological infrastructures. This notion is abbreviated and used interchangeably with the following terms: weightless technology, weightless hardware and free-floating infrastructure.