It is widely accepted that acoustic and digital musical instruments shape the cognitive processes of the performer on both embodied and conceptual levels, ultimately influencing the structure and aesthetics of the resulting performance. In this article we examine the ways in which computer music languages might similarly influence the aesthetic decisions of the digital music practitioner, even when those languages are designed for generality and theoretically capable of implementing any sound-producing process. We examine the basis for querying the non-neutrality of tools with a particular focus on the concept of idiomaticity: patterns of instruments or languages which are particularly easy or natural to execute in comparison to others. We then present correspondence with the developers of several major music programming languages and a survey of digital musical instrument creators examining the relationship between idiomatic patterns of the language and the characteristics of the resulting instruments and pieces. In an open-ended creative domain, asserting causal relationships is difficult and potentially inappropriate, but we find a complex interplay between language, instrument, piece and performance that suggests that the creator of the music programming language should be considered one party to a creative conversation that occurs each time a new instrument is designed.

There are many ways in which wisdom pervades artistic discourse. It is only recently, however, that a concerted effort has been made to understand the wisdom embodied in music. Drawing from the literal translation of phonosophy, this article attempts to unveil what might be described as sonic wisdom from a composer’s perspective, derived from an interview between Australian philosopher Samuel McAuliffe and composer Cat Hope. Hope’s notational practice challenges the hierarchies established by common practice notation, resulting in her contemporary art music being accessible to a wider range of performers, including those that do not read any music notations. Engagement with Hope’s notation leads to a revealing and transfer of a different kind of sonic wisdom than found in more traditionally notated works, in a process facilitated by technologies and articulated through musicianship.

This article explores how computation opens up possibilities for new musical practices to emerge through technology design. Using the notion of the cultural probe as a lens, we consider the digital musical instrument as an experimental device that yields findings across the fields of music, sociology and acoustics. As part of an artistic-research methodology, the instrumental object as a probe is offered as a means for artists to answer questions that are often formulated outside semantic language. This article considers how computation plays an important role in the authors’ personal performance practices in different ways, which reflect the changed mode-of-being of new musical instruments and our individual and collective relations with them.

This article describes an innovative compositional method based on the use of a sonic time-lapse algorithm to create soundscape audio montages. The method is based on the superposition of short audio samples of 24-hour continuous field recordings carried out in various kinds of wildlife sonic environments. The optimisation of the algorithm focused on the enhancement of gradual crossfade transitions between recorded samples and the use of variable sample durations as a way of recreating a natural sense of evolution of sonic events in time. Future developments of the project will integrate virtual reality interfaces and environmental education projects as part of the time-lapse algorithm machine-learning techniques and also creative tools suitable for multimedia installations.

Digital games are a fertile ground for exploring novel computer music applications. While the lineage of game-based compositional praxis long precedes the advent of digital computers, it flourishes now in a rich landscape of music-making apps, sound toys and playful installations that provide access to music creation through game-like interaction. Characterising these systems is the pervasive avoidance of a competitive game framework, reflecting an underlying assumption that notions of conflict and challenge are somewhat antithetical to musical creativity. As a result, the interplay between competitive gameplay and musical creativity is seldom explored. This article reports on a comparative user evaluation of two original games that frame interactive music composition as a human–computer competition. The games employ contrasting designs so that their juxtaposition can address the following research question: how are player perceptions of musical creativity shaped in competitive game environments? Significant differences were found in system usability, and also creativity and ownership of musical outcomes. The user study indicates that a high degree of musical control is widely preferred despite an apparent cost to general usability. It further reveals that players have diverse criteria for ‘games’ which can dramatically influence their perceptions of musical creativity, control and ownership. These findings offer new insights for the design of future game-based composition systems, and reflect more broadly on the complex relationship between musical creativity, games and competition.

This article concerns the temporal experience of acousmatic music, how the music can impact a listener’s sense of time passing and the implications of memory and expectations of auditory events and their perceived connections to one another. It will outline how memory and schemas lead to predictions in the immediate future and larger expectations of a work’s form. An overview of the temporal listening framework for acousmatic music will be provided to show the interrelationship between memory and expectations and how they influence one’s listening focus in the present. Trevor Wishart’s Imago will be used to illustrate how one might compose an acousmatic work to promote active listening using compositional techniques that engage personal schemas and those built through the course of experiencing the piece.

This article assembles and summarises the main ideas presented in the doctoral thesis entitled ‘Voice and Poetry as Inspiration and Material in Acousmatic Music’ by the author and describes his idiosyncratic method for acousmatic composition based on Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro’s aesthetic theory, which is a system that aims at creating artistic works by taking materials from reality and combining them in unexpected ways. The objective of this combination is an equilibrium between rationality and intuition in order to obtain a poem independent of the real world, in the sense of a poetic outcome which avoids traditional mimesis. This creative system, known as Creacionismo, has a central role between various other theoretical, artistic and mainly poetic sources informing the author’s creative process. Huidobro’s creative system has been applied by the author to acousmatic composition procedures generating the notion of acousmatic-creationist as a nomenclature for the process. This particular creative strategy balances rationality and intuition within acousmatic composition and places poetry as a driving force in the use of voice, merging artistic practice and theory in a recursive action.

‘Rhythm’ is often equated with ‘metered pulse’; as the latter is often eschewed by contemporary music, including acousmatic music, this is often assumed to mean an absence of rhythm. This article proposes that, in fact, acousmatic music does indeed contain rhythmic qualities, and further, that rhythm is one of the dominating forces of acousmatic music, even when pulse or metre at first glance appear to be lacking. This stems from the roots of acousmatic philosophy in phenomenology and a steady focus on our experience of the world around us. Importantly, this points simultaneously towards rhythmic qualities of our environment and towards rhythmic qualities of our embodied experience of that world, due to rhythmic aspects of our bodies, our perception and our cognitive faculties.

ScreenPlay is a unique interactive computer music system (ICMS) that draws upon various computational styles from within the field of human–computer interaction (HCI) in music, allowing it to transcend the socially contextual boundaries that separate different approaches to ICMS design and implementation, as well as the overarching spheres of experimental/academic and popular electronic musics. A key aspect of ScreenPlay’s design in achieving this is the novel inclusion of topic theory, which also enables ScreenPlay to bridge a gap spanning both time and genre between Classical/Romantic era music and contemporary electronic music; providing new and creative insights into the subject of topic theory and its potential for reappropriation within the sonic arts.

Since Schaeffer’s development of musique concrète, there has been an ongoing debate regarding the value of the acousmatic reduction for engaging with real-world sound in music, and its relevance for composers and listeners. This article presents a way of working with acousmatic sound that is more meaningful to me as a composer, which I have labelled experiential listening. In understanding acousmatic sound through the lens of experientialism (as opposed to Schaeffer’s use of phenomenology), I have devised this method to form a dialogue between sound, composer, and listener through the use of metaphor, to explore concepts beyond the experience of just sound in itself while composing. It accounts for the felt sense of intuition that can form through working with acousmatic sound, presenting a way of using this as a tool for self-understanding. It highlights Brian Kane’s ontology of acousmatic sound as the being of a gap, exploring where this gap can take the mind of the composer and listener. This is illustrated through my use of experiential listening to gain insights into lived experiences of mental illness and trauma, which reveals inner wisdom about the listening self that can be negotiated through acousmatic sound.

Music history is full of examples of composers drawing upon traditional repertoires for their works. Starting from the late nineteenth century in particular, many of them have looked at this specific sound material for several reasons: overcoming the limitations of tonal system, discovering different compositional strategies, finding new inspiration and aesthetics, evoking exoticism. Electronic music is no exception. Since the emergence of sound recording, sonic artists and electronic music composers have experimented with new technologies trying to integrate traditional elements in their works with different results and various purposes. In the present time, the preservation of these traditional elements could represent one of the most crucial goals. In a world characterised by a widespread globalisation, traditional music might be at risk of being neglected or even forgotten, as for local identities and cultures in general. As electronic music composers and sonic artists we should ask ourselves if it is possible to create a link between tradition and innovation, connecting these two apparently opposite realities. Can we safeguard at-risk traditions and at the same time re-present them through contemporary artistic practices and technologies? Is there a way to develop a form of expression that could reach a wide and diverse range of listeners, taking into account recent trends and studies in electronic music while preserving the main distinctive features of the traditional repertoires? The article attempts to answer the above-mentioned questions with the support of a case study: the personal research conducted into the use of traditional music from the southern Italian region of Campania in the scope of electronic music composition.

This article explores timescales within absolute and psychological times, and identifies the many factors that affect our perception of time passing and estimation of durations, which inevitably influence our perception of musical structures; in particular, it discusses listening experiences, and theoretical approaches to psychological states and emotional responses. It proposes a process according to which the time-influencing factors operate between listener and music. The discussion is approached through the lens of the electroacoustic composer and makes references to short excerpts from the author’s work and related repertoire. However, as the article discusses time in relation to sound structures, it is also relevant to other time-based sound art and music.

This article makes an argument for the postcritical treatment of the politics of sound art. Counterpointing an autoethnographic analysis of Kristina Kubisch’s Electrical Walks with Seth Kim-Cohen’s critical reading of the same work, I show how a critical position detached from the lived experience leaves behind a wealth of meanings necessary to understand the political potential of sound art. This gap, I argue, necessitates a ‘radical empiricist’ approach shifting the focus from the artistic intent to the lived experiences of the audience and the effects sound art may have on their lives. Drawing on autoethnographic and ethnographic accounts of Kaffe Matthews’s sonic bike rides and Benoît Maubrey Speaker Sculptures, as well as Rita Felski’s project of postcritical reading, I develop a theoretical framework for the politics of sound art based around the concept of affordance. The term ‘affordance’ in this context refers to the possibilities of political meaning or political action an artwork offers to the participants without imposing a particular interpretation on them. I finish by discussing three aspects of political affordances in sound art: meaning-making, uses of sound art and access to participation.

In three previous issues of OS (10/1, 2005, 13/3, 2008 and 19/2, 2014) a range of scholars explored non-Western instrumentation in electroacoustic music. These issues addressed concerns about sensitive cultural issues within electroacoustic music. This article builds upon this discussion through an examination of a number of electroacoustic composer-performers using non-Western instrumentation. This discussion will include the voices of ‘Western’ electroacoustic composers using non-Western instruments or sounds sources. It will also document some of the work of non-Western electroacoustic composers who incorporate traditional material or indigenous instruments in their music. Special attention will be given to the complexity of being in-between musical cultures through a critical engagement with theories relating to hybridity, orientalism and self-identity. In particular, this article will focus on my own practice of composing and performing electroacoustic music with the North Indian lute known as the sarode. It will discuss both cultural and artistic concerns about using the sarode outside the framework of Indian classical music and question whether Indian classical music can ever be ‘appropriately appropriated’ in an electroacoustic context. Two of my recent compositions will be explored and I will outline the development of my practice leading to the creation of a new ‘hybrid’ instrument especially for playing electroacoustic music.

Electroacoustic music and its historical antecedents open up new ways of thinking about musical time. Whereas music performed by humans is necessarily constrained by certain temporal limits that define human information processing and embodiment, machines are capable of producing sound with scales and structures of time that reach potentially very far outside of these human limitations. But even musics produced with superhuman means are still subject to human constraints in music perception and cognition. Focusing on five principles of auditory perception – segmentation, grouping, pulse, metre and repetition – we hypothesise that musics that exceed or subvert the thresholds that define ‘human time’ are likely to be recognised by listeners as expressing timelessness. To support this hypothesis, we report an experiment in which a listening panel reviewed excerpts of electroacoustic music selected for their temporally subversive or excessive properties, and rated them (1) for the pace of time they express (normative, speeding up, or slowing down), and (2) for whether or not the music expresses ‘timelessness’. We find that while the specific musical parameters associated with temporal phenomenology vary from one musical context to the next, a general trend obtains across musical contexts through the excess or subversion of a particular perceptual constraint by a given musical parameter on the one hand, and the subjective experiences of time and timelessness on the other.

This article looks at the emergence of physical material in a growing number of contemporary sound-based art practices. From academic symposia to music festivals and media art exhibitions, the material presence of physical artefacts is notable in a variety of sound-based disciplines and scenarios. Considering the significance of the visual aspect of these works, this article proposes a reassessment of what audiovisual entails. I argue that our understanding of audiovisual status needs to be expanded beyond the scope of screen-based applications and move into the physical realm of objects and material. Further to this, I outline how the dominant discussions around materiality in sound-based art do not speak sufficiently to the physical materiality manifested in a growing wave within the field. Using an example of my own creative work, I will then suggest audiovisual materialism as an alternative lens through which such practices can be better examined, understood and built upon.

Many aural analytical methods have been produced for electroacoustic music that focus on the identification of salient morphological features of the sounds. Doing so, they usually overlook the importance of time – a central aspect of music – sometimes by considering it as a simple compositional parameter. However, this article proposes a novel theoretical framework for electroacoustic music understanding by putting time and its cognitive representations during perception at the forefront. Two concepts are introduced to propose this alternative approach to electroacoustic music description: temporal directionality, which focuses on the sounds themselves, and temporal distancing, which focuses on the relations between sounds. Throughout this article, several musical examples are given to briefly exemplify how such concepts can be used in an explanatory context. Finally, polychrony is introduced, which aims to describe how electroacoustic composers play with the various cases of temporal directionality and distancing, and, in the process, actually weave time itself.

Using a mixture of physiological evidence and analogies of time, the author describes the current version of a model of how we might view our interactions with time in music and beyond. An older model designed for analysis of complex twentieth-century acoustic works is updated to incorporate varied profiles of electroacoustic music. Recent research in auditory systems corroborates that we receive different types of information simultaneously through different channels, each taking more or less periodic sampling from different bands of frequencies – from timbre to phrase length and beyond. In order to acknowledge both the primitive structures of our complex hearing mechanisms and the different profiles of listeners, it is suggested that this multiple-sampling strategy may operate in a parallel way at a much larger scale, thereby allowing us to integrate the listener’s preference for pacing, contrast and densities of activity into the sensory processing of a musical work. The article is enriched by insights from soundscape pioneer Hildegard Westerkamp relating to various aspects of the discussion, from sensory overload to ecological concerns to the natural rallentando of a soundwalk. Finally, a whimsical elaboration based on the analogy of time as a river is presented in order to incorporate a more organic set of characteristics into our appreciation of music and time.