Musical coherence is essential for the achievement of meaning in any particular work. While it is possible to speculate on a variety of reasons which may facilitate this coherence, many would agree that an important determinant may be found in the successful articulation of the work’s structure. Furthermore, structure is realised through discourse, which is dependent on the articulation of actual sounds: inflections, accents, local changes in tempo, etc., may alter the meaning of a passage significantly. Although this is true of any music, it acquires additional significance for the composer in the electroacoustic domain since she becomes responsible for the inner attributes of timbre.

As a composer in the very late twentieth century my goal is to inject as much intelligence and substance into the process of music-making as possible, to present listeners with sensory and intellectual metaphorical tools that enable them to perceive relationships of time and space in ways that might otherwise go unnoticed. Music-oriented researchers in the fields of psychoacoustics and cognition in recent years have viewed the computer as a means of simply extending and rationalising traditional music theory and form, rather than summarising the base of musical knowledge we have inherited and then breaking free of those constraints. Performers, composers and producers in the field of popular entertainment continue to use technology to narrow rather than broaden aesthetic boundaries in the so-called creative arts.

A new aesthetic paradigm is needed . . .

Technology provides us with the tools we require in order to build a genuinely new method of music creation and listening. I propose that it is time to invest our energies in the creation of visionary learning tools that enhance our ability to evolve in our relationship to ourselves, to one another, to the planet, and perhaps ultimately to the stars. It is the author’s strongest desire to allow for the full realisation of what computer music has long held the promise to provide – limitless variation with infinite control.

Toward this end, I document here (i) a theory of music that attempts to assimilate the infinite and subtle interconnectedness of the human experience into a single symbolic structure, and (ii) the application of this theory to the extension of an emerging genre – the environmentally interactive computer music system – designed for eventual use by people not necessarily aware of the underlying technical and aesthetic principles at work, but fully appreciative of the profound personal benefits to be found embedded therein.

Owing to space limitations, I will focus almost exclusively on the theoretical and aesthetic issues that have driven the software development, and leave a detailed discussion of the system specifications and its operation to a separate article.

The Law of One, my doctoral thesis composed during 1980 and 1981, was the first in an ongoing series of works which employed the numeric relations of the overtone series to determine all other compositional parameters, pitch, timbre, harmony, rhythm and several nested magnifications of form. The entire composition is a large fractal with a simple principle of construction permeating every aspect of the composition from micro to macro. Copies of the score are available from UMI. Write or call UMI, 300 N.Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, MI 48106, USA. Tel. (800) 521-0660. Ask for order no. DA8214158.

This paper addresses the overwhelming importance which computer music composers usually place on the structural elements of their music. It deconstructs the belief that the meaning of music lies within its structure. This represents only one half of the equation, while the other half embodies the notion that music is ultimately intended to be listened to by subjective human beings who will interpret the music in different ways. The meaning is not located in the musical object (the piece), nor is it exclusively in the mind of the perceiver (human), but rather lies in the relationship between the two. Furthermore, this paper proposes that there are no objective aspects of music at all. To support this claim, the author uses the latest research from neuroscience, cognitive psychology and neo-Darwinism. Analysing the pitfalls of the modernist world view and the structure-based music that it has produced, the author proposes postmodern methods for the survival of computer music. In order to do so this paper relies on Richard Dawkins’ concept of cultural memes.

Pierre Schaeffer's notion of Arts-Relais highlights aesthetic fissures in the passage from manual to mechanical techniques of sound production, fixation and reproduction. The Arts-Relais ‘instrument’ is a case of what Walter Benjamin terms technische Reproduzierbarkeit, and there is a close resemblance between the two roles of that instrument and the two manifestations of technische Reproduzierbarkeit as expounded by Benjamin. Furthermore, the Arts-Relaisinstrument materialises the shift from ‘older handwork technology’ to that technology which, in the words of Martin Heidegger, unlocks, transforms, stores up, distributes and switches about the energies of nature, and whose essence he terms Ge-stell. Heidegger's ‘sinking of the object into the objectlessness of the standing reserve’ (a feat of Ge-stell) intersects Benjamin's ‘decline of the aura’ (a feat of technische Reproduzierbarkeit), but while the decline of the aura paves the way for art as political praxis, the sinking of the object into the objectlessness of the standing reserve elicits from Heidegger an invitation to a return to the golden age of Greek techne. Is this not praxis too? And how does Schaeffer respond to Heidegger's invitation?

As befits an Homage to Schaeffer, this essay improvises ‘new uses for things originally meant for something else’ (Schaeffer and Hodgkinson 1987: 5), according to the rule of bricolage: to make do with whatever is at hand (Lévi-Strauss 1962: 17). A new structure is invested with disused remnants of old structures (Genette 1963: 37), as practised by the savage mind, structural thinking, musique concréte and Oswald de Andrade's antropofagia (Andrade 1928). One saves up by not making it to measure at the cost of a double operation: analysis (extraction of various elements from organised ensembles) and synthesis (organisation of these elements into a new ensemble where ultimately they will be entirely detached from their original functions).

Six historical electroacoustic compositions from the 1950s to the 1960s are analysed in search of a series of ‘narrative strategies’ whose validity can be extended to the electroacoustic repertoire. In this paper we propose some examples of the narrative elements, showing analogies and differences in their use by different composers and in the context of different studios of production.

This article deals with two of my works, both of which were composed to literary texts in Arabic. The first is one of my shortest compositions and the second is one of the longest. The Gown of Night (1988), for magnetic tape, is based on the voices of Bedouin children articulating a text by Muhammad Ghana’im (Israel) and lasts 2 minutes and 42 seconds. Like Two Branches (1989), a cantata for chamber choir, two oboes, kanun (or piano), violoncello and a set of supplemented tar drums, is based on text by Al-Khansa – who lived in the Arabian Peninsula in the sixth century AD – and lasts 42 minutes. The ongoing process involving the composition of these two works in the late 1980s resulted in their successive appearance in 1988 and 1990.

In multimedia art and communication, sound models are needed which are versatile, responsive to users’ expectations, and have high audio quality. Moreover, model flexibility for human-machine interaction is a major issue. Models based on the physics of actual or virtual objects can meet all of these requirements, thus allowing the user to rely on high-level descriptions of the sounding entities. As long as the sound description is based on the physics of sounding objects and not only on the characteristics of human hearing, an integration with physics-based graphic models becomes possible.

The MUSIC N-family of sound compilers offers a flexible but complex set of tools for computer music composition. These packages are, in a general sense, difficult to grasp by the beginner. Their design is also based on an outdated paradigm of scores and orchestras. New alternatives to such systems are a current necessity. This paper presents the software Audio Workshop as a proposed design for a sound synthesis and processing system. This program has been developed for the Win32 platform, offering many synthesis and processing options in a simpler and intuitive way. The paper describes the elements of the program and discusses its design and applications.

The annual Organised Sound CD will contain the following pieces and musical examples from Volume 3, Number 1: