Guided by the idea of participatory culture, networked pulse synchronisation and live coding have been core approaches in the activity of the Cybernetic Orchestra, an electronic performance ensemble at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada. Following general discussion of the way in which networked pulse-based music and live coding work within this orchestra, there is specific discussion of a number of compositional models and practices that have been found effective, including code-sharing, instruction-scores, code as material, and physical performance.

This article addresses the place of music in the Western worldview, arguing for a greater appreciation of music in a modern eco-cosmology which embraces environmental priorities as central to human prosperity, while contextualising defensible connections between music, sound and environment potentially useful for electroacoustic musical practice. Precise analytical terminology is established, and the methodology of environmental history is used to assess Western understandings about the role and place of music. Origins and ideas regarding immersive space, emotive power and the development of dualistic ‘nature–culture’ schemas are explored. Impacts of key developments in twentieth-century technology and environmental thought are examined as they relate to electroacoustic research. Biomusicology is reviewed for insights into innate musical structures and possibilities, and a recent linguistic study is analysed from a musical perspective to advance a cross-disciplinary argument: music may represent a form of mitigational behaviour used to balance the evolutionary tradeoff that enabled modern language. This argument suggests that if music in itself represents an environment critical for human mental health, then the contribution of electroacoustic music is vital for fresh eco-critical debate and awareness, and that an increased musical practice, especially in participatory contexts, may be essential for the human project.

The field of electroacoustic music has witnessed years of extensive exploration of aural spatial perception and an abundance of spatialisation techniques. Today the growing ubiquity of visual 3D technologies gives artists a similar opportunity in the realm of visual music. With the use of stereoscopic video we now have the ability to compose individual depth cues independently. The process of continuous change of the perceived depth of the audiovisual space over time is being referred to as depth modulation, and can only be fully appreciated through motion.

What can be achieved through the separation and manipulation of visual and sonic spatial cues? What can we learn about the way we perceive space if the basic components building our understanding of the surrounding environment are artificially split and re-arranged?

Visual music appears to be a perfect field for such experimentation. Strata of visual and aural depth cues can be used to create audiovisual counterpoints in three-dimensional spaces. The choice of abstract imagery and the lack of obvious narrative storylines allow us to focus our perception on the evolution of the immersive audiovisual space itself. A new language of an immersive audiovisual medium should emerge as a delicate, ever-changing balance between all previously separated and altered components.

Historically, network music has explored the practice and theory of interconnectivity, utilising the network itself as a creative instrument. The Machine Orchestra (TMO) has extended this historical idea by developing the custom software suite Signal, and creating a shared, social instrument consisting of musical robotics. Signal is a framework for musical synchronisation and data sharing, designed to support the use of musical robotics in an attempt to more fully address ideas of interconnectivity and embodied performance. Signal, in combination with musical robotics, also facilitates the exploration of interaction contexts, such as at the note level, score level and sound-processing level. In this way, TMO is simultaneously building upon the historical contributions and developing aesthetics of network music.

This article argues that the state of spatial awareness engendered by the art of soundscape composition can be productively extended to the act of listening while looking in the cinema. Central to my argument is how Katharine Norman's concept of reflective listening in soundscape composition can be adapted to reflective audioviewing in the audiovisual context of film. Norman begins the process of intersecting film theory and the discourse of soundscape composition by appealing to famed Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein's theories of montage to illustrate how soundscape composition enables active listener engagement. I extend her discussion of Eisenstein to demonstrate how this filmmaker's thinking about sound/image synchronisation in the cinema – and R. Murray Schafer's own predilection for Eisensteinian dialectics – can be understood as a means towards the practice of reflective audioviewing. I illustrate my argument with an analysis of how the soundscape compositions of Hildegard Westerkamp have been incorporated into Gus Van Sant's film Elephant. Attention to the reflective qualities of Westerkamp's work open up new dimensions in our experience of the audiovisual construction of space in the film. Ultimately I argue that the reflective audioviewing prompted by Elephant can be carried into considerations of all films that make use of sound design for spatial representation.

What does it mean to speak of tele-media as a musical instrument? The unfolding of this question is aided by analysis of the control domains of two existing instrument categories, acoustic instruments and digital controllers. Design criteria for making tele-media instruments are formulated thence, and also from consideration of the special capacity of tele-media to bring together multi-lateral non-proximate control sources. Such design anticipates musicians in different continents participating in single sonic outcomes. What does it mean for such a tele-instrument to facilitate virtuosic performance? Any high standard of instrument making urges that instrument makers do so. Virtuosity is understood in part as performance presence, an important issue for tele-media criticism. The broader topic concerning the relation between presence and transmission is represented narrowly here in a single argument. Transmission of performance intention is more important to remote performance presence than literal representations of musicians on stage. Performance presence is better facilitated by interactive graphic notations that dynamically render control domain data into images. Two tele-performances inform the discussion.

Within William Seitz's 1961 exhibition The Art of Assemblage for the New York Museum of Modern Art, the question of framing – of art's exhibitionary situation within and against a given environment – had emerged as perhaps the major issue of postwar avant-garde practice. Beyond the familiar paintings of Johns and Rauschenberg, a strategy of radical juxtaposition in this time extended well beyond the use of new materials, to the very institutions of aesthetic exhibition and spectatorship. Perhaps the most significant example of this disciplinary juxtaposition can be found in the intermingling of the static and the temporal arts. Like many artists of the twentieth century, Robert Breer was fascinated by the aesthetic and philosophical character of movement. Trained as a painter, he turned to cinematic animation as a way of extending his inquiry into modernist abstraction. While the success of his initial Form Phases spurred what would be a lifelong commitment to film, Breer quickly grew frustrated with the kind of abstract animation that might be said to characterise the dominant tradition of visual music. Starting in 1955, his Image by Images inaugurated a radical new vision of hyperkinetic montage that would paradoxically function at the threshold of movement and stasis. As such, Breer's film ‘accompaniment’ to the 1964 production of Stockhausen's Originals has a curious status. While untethered from the musical performance, Breer's three-part ‘film performance’ extended Stockhausen's aesthetic and conceptual framework in rich and surprising ways. It might thus be understood as a ‘post-Cagean’ form of visual music, one in which the sonic and visual components function in a relation of autonomous complementarity within an overarching intermedia assemblage.

Network music foregrounds the materials and processes of communication and in so doing repositions the acousmatic and other strata of electroacoustic music practice. The type of network music considered in this paper, at base defines a member of its category as music which undergoes an electrical-optical conversion, referring to its transport over fibre-optic research network backbones. A more compelling motivation for us is the realisation that network music entails the exploration of disjunct chronotopic frames (stated less poetically as ‘latency in the network’) using probes of sonic material travelling near the speed of light. This article is an overview of a three-year project investigating music performance over high-speed research networks, a project funded by the Canada Research Chair programme (Syneme). The aim of the project was fourfold: to investigate aspects of physical and social networks in the production of network music (The Network); to investigate a branch of study continuing but critically distinct from Internet music as marked by ingenious strategies mounted to overcome the conditions of slow networks (Liveness); to embed ourselves in new practices (Telemusic Studio) and technologies (Artsmesh); and to compose network music pieces (Net Works). Our narrative picks up from where high-speed P2P networking crosses a threshold producing a successor to the Internet akin to the methodological shift that occurred in electroacoustics when CPUs achieved rendering speeds that allowed for real-time audio.

This article is based on my creative practice as an electroacoustic1 composer who has developed a practice of audiovisual composition broadly sited within the field of visual music.

A brief contextual survey sites my work by first presenting a personal definition of visual music and of a set of conceptual approaches to work in this field. My practice is framed as an attempt to apply ideas and principles taken from musique concrète in an audiovisual domain. I discuss in particular the idea of reduced listening and propose a visual equivalent, visual suspension.

I discuss the problems around reduced listening when applied to concrète ‘real-world’ sounds, and propose that two audio archetypes, silence (or tending-to-silence) and noise (or tending-to-noise), exhibit unique physical and phenomenological properties which sidestep these issues. Observing a similar set of problems around visual suspension, I propose visual counterparts to silence and noise – by relating both to the idea of self-similarity, both temporal and spatial – which exhibit similar properties. In my own work I have found these audiovisual territories to be especially fertile, and to open up avenues for new kinds of sound–image relationships with great creative potential.

In this paper I examine metaphors of place and place making, with reference to the phenomenological tradition and in particular Edward S. Casey, in relation both to sound-based music and art concerned with environment, and to listening and environmental sound. I do so in order to consider how aspects of place-making activity might be incorporated in aurally perceived works, and elicited in listeners, so that we might perhaps achieve a greater sense of ‘connectedness’ to sound-based music and art that is itself about – in some way – our connectedness to the environment. Three works, by Feld, Monacchi and López, form the basis for investigation.

The word ‘acousmatic’ has a strange and complicated history. Recent Schaefferian accounts have replicated François Bayle's sketch of the ‘histoire du mot’ from his Musique acousmatique – in particular, the assumed synonymy between ‘acousmatique’ and ‘acousmate’. However, this synonymy is mistaken. The word ‘acousmate’ was first coined in an article from 1730 to describe a strange noise heard one evening in the small French village of Ansacq. A discussion of the article follows, which shows how the word is unrelated to the Pythagorean acousmatics, and how its author understood his ‘acousmate’ in the context of contemporary natural science. Additionally, a sketch of the term's changing signification in three discourses – scientific, psychological and literary – is presented. The goal of this article is to articulate a set of problems concerning the historiography of acousmatic listening in the Schaefferian tradition. These problems include: 1) the need to authorise a practice of musique acousmatique, which has limited historical investigation to moments where the word ‘acousmate’ or ‘acousmatique’ appear in the archive; 2) a mistaken assumption that ‘acousmate’ and ‘acousmatique’ are synonymous, which has forced together historical moments that are not in fact affiliated; 3) an adherence to this affiliation, which has foreclosed the opportunity to consider acousmatic listening as a set of culturally and historically specific practices concerning the relationship of seeing and hearing.