With the proliferation of transport infrastructure in sixteenth-century England, the term network appeared. From then on, its use spread to the most varied fields, so that today it occupies various significant nodes in our thinking – it has become a way to understand the world. Network music can be situated somewhere between such a conceptual and the more technical meaning of the term. It covers a broad range from collaborative composition environments to sound installations and improvised music ensembles. Within today's computer music, networks play an important role. Be it laptop ensembles that use the local ethernet to exchange hidden musical messages, composition tools for searching online sound databases, or shared environments for musical improvisation on the internet – the communicative and social aspects of music-making are reflected in the computer instrument. The history of the computer is closely linked with the history of telecommunication, so that it is not surprising that network music has been evolving together with computer music. Nevertheless, as we will see, network music goes beyond the technical needs of communication – it investigates the implications of networking in a much broader sense.

This chapter gives an introduction to basic aspects of this field, providing a background for understanding network pieces and giving inspiration for new developments. As far as possible, we try to include the cultural context that forms the background of contemporary network music pieces. The first two sections will cover the aspect of transmission, and the role of material and symbolic mediation within sound-based art. In the next section, we will first follow a brief history of the network paradigm in computer languages.