The development of computers and technology has made electroacoustic music an important part of modern music. In an effort to broaden the musical dimension and to offer more possibilities for timbral combinations, composers have used various techniques to combine electroacoustic music with acoustic instruments, giving traditional instrumental music a richer timbre, a wider range of pitches and greater sonic expressiveness. The pipa, a typical representative of Chinese music culture, has a long history and its unique timbre is widely loved by electroacoustic music composers. This article uses Marc Battier’s mixed music Mist on a Hill (for pipa and electroacoustic sounds) as an example to explore the integration and practical use of Chinese folk elements in electroacoustic music.

Composers, producers and educators King Britt and Tara Rodgers discuss music technology history and pedagogy in the context of King Britt’s Blacktronika course at the University of California San Diego, which researches and celebrates Black artists and other artists of colour who are pioneers of electronic music genres. Conducted over email in June 2021, this interview also touches on King Britt’s studio practice and evolution as an artist and educator, as well as on the social and political roots of contemporary electronic music genres.

In a previous edition of Organised Sound, I discussed the potential for using the North Indian sarode in electroacoustic music. In that article, I explored how electroacoustic music artists manage to integrate multiple cultural frameworks, while also acknowledging the importance of personal artistic agency. The primary question that emerged from that research is extended in this article: how does an electroacoustic performer of a non-Western instrument improvise outside the idiom of their tradition? In order to address this question, I draw on Tomlinson’s concept of the metaphysical imaginary. In my own performance practice, I employ the metaphysical imaginary as a framework to explore a transcultural, transcendent, perhaps even spiritual potential of electroacoustic improvisation. The metaphysical imaginary will be explored in two dimensions: the synchronic and the diachronic. The synchronic dimension looks horizontally across cultures, while the diachronic dimension looks in a temporal verticality, looking inwards and downwards, to a time before modern culture. In the article, I discuss the performance practice of other musicians working across different cultural frames who explore the metaphysical in their improvisations. The article also looks backwards in cultural historical time and investigates how improvisers draw inspiration from a pre-modern cultural world, combining these imaginaries with modern sound techniques. I will situate my own work within this mosaic of practices, concluding with a discussion of electroacoustic improvisations using the sarode, extended technique and the re-imagining of pre-historic sonic rituals.

Liubai (留白, literally ‘leaving blankness’) is a unique method of expression in Chinese classical paintings. The core spirit of the technique is inextricably linked to ancient Chinese Taoism and traditional aesthetics, which are prominently featured by simplicity and nationality. This article, taking the real-time interactive electroacoustic Chinese art song ‘Lang Tao Sha’ (浪淘沙), explores the use of the artistic technique of liubai from the perspective of a soprano singer by focusing on the three aspects of lyrics, vocal music and electroacoustic music creation, and singing performance.

This article argues that pop music’s increasing assimilation of hip-hop and EDM (electronic dance music) practices combine with computational automation and this has substantial consequences for musical space. Traditional ‘space-makers’ such as reverb or delay are subject to other functions such as frequency filters and compression that interrelate processual layers of textures. Instead of an active-listener-orientated sonic space with distinct source-bonded entities, it is based on a particular sonic materiality. With a new media theoretical approach, I consequently argue that this new type of space can better be understood as a mediatised topological materiality.

The desire to work in real time and improvise with the possibilities of tape-based studio practice was a key design intention of early modular synthesisers. The resulting instruments, in particular the Buchla, emphasised possibilities for the creation of musical structure in combination with components designed to enable real-time, expressive interaction. As smaller, keyboard-based synthesiser instruments achieved broad commercial success, many of the possibilities for the real-time creation and manipulation of musical structures, developed in the larger modular synthesiser designs, were not carried forward into the new age of commercial electronic music instruments. The resurgence of the modular synthesiser has seen these possibilities for improvisation of musical structures revisited, opening up processes and approaches that were almost lost to a new generation. Following an analysis of the genesis of modular synthesisers, with a focus on the Buchla, this article describes three examples of modular synthesiser-based compositional processes that enable the performer to undertake improvised actions in real time that construct, influence and distort musical structure. These examples are then analysed to better understand the processes, motivations and experiences of using a modular synthesiser to construct musical structure in a real-time and improvised fashion.

Yarlung Zangbo is a multimedia symphony combining orchestra, visual images and electroacoustic music by one of China’s most internationally influential electroacoustic music composers, Zhang Xiaofu. This article focuses on the spatial aspects of Yarlung Zangbo. First, we discuss two different spatial composition preferences in electroacoustic music: image delivery and creation. We then divide the development of electroacoustic orchestral music into three different periods and examine the general spatial intention of the works in these periods. Finally, we analyse and identify four spatial composition strategies of Yarlung Zangbo: equity, virtuosity, diversity and unity. The successful utilisation of these strategies has not only made the piece a milestone in Chinese electroacoustic music, but also a unique and meaningful contribution to the electroacoustic music repertoire worldwide. We believe this article will provide valuable knowledge and insight for future research and practice of spatial composition.

The importance that Chinese composers attach to their nation’s cultural traditions in their electronic music compositions has become a dominant trend in Chinese electronic music. This has generally led to a ‘Chinese imagery’ in Chinese electronic music compositions. Among China-inspired electroacoustic music, the interactive multimedia work A Reflection in the Brook (小青, 2013) shows a unique expression. The author explores how the composer recreated a controversial female figure in Chinese history through a completely real-time audiovisual language: Feng Xiaoqing, thereby presenting Chinese imagery in electroacoustic music through an alternative approach. The audiovisual relationship in A Reflection in the Brook will be analysed through the lens of Michel Chion’s audiovisual theory and the perspective of musical composition techniques, further presenting the audiovisual aesthetics of multimedia electronic music.

This article discusses the compositional taxonomy of music theatre works by Constança Capdeville (1937–92) and offers a way to analyse her music and collaborative processes and also the performance of her work through a case study of the piece Double. Capdeville’s works include different elements such as music, settings (staging), movement, text, tape-recorded sound, visual image, props, costumes and lighting. Documentation for the compositions is scattered across different sources or simply lost, making it difficult to reconstruct the works as they have improvised hypothetical components and idiosyncratic or non-standard notations. Using a type of musicological archeology, I want to contribute to the understanding of gesture, language and communication in Capdeville’s works. I aim to preserve the works, particularly by highlighting the collaborative approach of the composer and proposing ways of establishing a documentation process for these aspects in order to systematise the works. I focus on the use of technology of magnetic tape as both a source of listening (the tapes provide a recording of the entire performance) and an instrument (tape recordings are given parts in the composition of the piece). Technology is also an important analytical tool because it helps to track collaborative creative processes. The iAnalyse software is used to help reconstruct and interpret music theatre works.

This article discusses the role of electroacoustic music practice in the context of human–robot interaction (HRI), illustrated by the first author’s work creating the sonic language of interactive robotic artwork Diamandini. It starts with a discussion of the role of sound in social robotics and surveys various notable conceptual approaches to robot sound. The central thesis of the article is that electroacoustic music can provide a valuable source of aesthetic considerations and creative practice for the creation of richer and more refined sonic HRIs by giving practitioners new ways to create believable sounding objects, to convey fiction, agency and animacy, and to communicate causality in auditory feedback. To demonstrate this, the authors describe the rationale for treating robot sound design as a compositional process and discuss the implications of the endeavour’s non-linear and site-specific nature. These considerations are illustrated using sound examples and design decisions made throughout the creation process of the robotic artwork. The authors conclude with observations on how the compositional process is affected by this particular application context.

The oeuvre of Japanese composer Yuasa Jōji holds a singular place in the contemporary musical landscape. From the artist collective Jikken Kōbō, in which he took part during the 1950s, to his later pieces for large orchestra, and through his innovative electroacoustic and mixed-music, Yuasa single-handedly explored a vast number of musical issues across the twentieth century. This article aims to shed a new light on the composer’s substantial musical output through his interest in topological theories. It will be a question of showing through examples, the different outcomes of the application of this mathematical model in the musical domain, all the while demonstrating how it takes place within his nexus of influences, as a centre towards which many other of Yuasa’s interests converge.

This article analyses recent developments of sonic art in Hong Kong. Based on a series of in-depth interviews with 23 local sonic art practitioners over the past six years, we discuss the contextual understanding of what constitutes ‘sonic art’ among local practitioners, along neighbouring terms such as ‘electroacoustic music’, ‘experimental music’ and ‘computer music’. We also give a description of the new generation of sonic art practitioners who emerged over the past ten years, contributing to a renewed sense of professionalism. These developments can be understood in relation to four aspects: a strong cluster of interrelated higher education institutions; a shift in public policy supporting ‘art and tech’ projects and cultural organisations; specific individuals, practitioners deeply invested in what we here define as sonic arts, acting as passeurs, connecting underground and academic milieux; and the international integration of Hong Kong-based sonic artists and promoters.

The most recent practices in sound art have emerged as pre-eminent spaces in which to question the interaction of sound with its environment. Accordingly, in this article, I envisage Arrhythmia, the sound installation by Bosch and Simons with Kostyrko (2019), as a device that helps to outline a horizontal sound ecology. This approach, which takes as its starting point the sound and material vibration in its entirety, implies a positive acceptance of an ontological continuity between the human and the non-human. This, in turn, implies that issues such as biopolitics cannot be reduced to the human realm. With this in mind, Arrhythmia emerges as a new kind of singular entity from which relationships with the environment can be conceived in a non-fragmented way.

Drawing from the ancient Chinese text The Zhuangzi, the sinologist François Jullien suggests that to nourish one’s life is to nourish life’s vital potential by keeping it open to renewal. Inspired by the anthropocosmic vision of environment improvisation developed by the Chinese musician Li Jianhong, this article begins to explore the philosophical and aesthetic principles that connect electroacoustic improvisation to life nourishment through discussions of electroacoustic improvising practices from China but not limited to China. This article proposes that an understanding of electroacoustic improvisation on the spiritual and existential level offers a refreshed conceptualisation of creativity, environment and improvisation at large.

This article investigates the use of machine learning within contemporary experimental music as a methodology for anthropology, as a transformational engagement that might shape knowing and feeling. In Midlands (2019), Sam Salem presents an (auto)ethnographical account of his relationship to the city of Derby, UK. By deriving musical materials from audio generated by the deep neural network WaveNet, Salem creates an uncanny, not-quite-right representation of his childhood hometown. Similarly, in her album A Late Anthology of Early Music Vol. 1: Ancient to Renaissance (2020), Jennifer Walshe uses the neural network SampleRNN to create a simulated narrative of Western art music. By mapping her own voice onto selected canonical works, Walshe presents both an autoethnographic and anthropological reimagining of a musical past and questions practices of historiography. These works are contextualised within the practice and theory of filmmaker-ethnographer Trinh T. Minh-ha and her notion of ‘speaking nearby’. In extension of Tim Ingold’s conception of anthropology, it is shown that both works make collaborative human and non-human inquiries into the possibilities of human (and non-human) life.

This text deals with the difficult task of notating timbre by addressing how it can be classified, synthesised, recognised and related to visual correspondences, and then looking at the relevance of these topics for notational purposes. Timbre is understood as dependent on both spectral and time-dependent features that can be notated in ways that make sense in relation to both perception and acoustics. This is achieved by taking the starting point in Lasse Thoresen’s spectromorphological analysis. Symbols originally developed for perception-based analysis are adapted for use over a hybrid spectrum-staff system to indicate the spectral qualities of timbre. To test the system, it was used to transcribe excerpts of three classic electroacoustic music works. In addition to the benefit of being able to compare the three excerpts transcribed with the same system, there is the advantage that the visual representation is based on spectral measurable qualities in the music. The notation system’s intuitiveness was also explored in listening tests, showing that it was possible to understand spectral notation symbols placed over a staff system, particularly for examples with two sound objects instead of one.

We propose a conceptual framework for describing and documenting sound installations from a visitor’s point of view. In the form of a taxonomy, the framework includes four complementary perspectives: sound sources, sound design approaches, visiting modalities and visual aspects. Its elaboration was informed by a review of contemporary sound installations in Quebec as well as a literature review on conceptual and theoretical frameworks on sound art and sound installations. Compared with existing frameworks, the taxonomy is useful for describing and comparing sound installations across meaningful perspectives from a visitor’s stance. To illustrate the potential benefits of the taxonomy and the diversity of installations it can portray, we provide a comparative analysis of four contemporary sound installations from different perspectives. We conclude with the use of this taxonomy for documentation purposes.

This article documents the circumstances surrounding the composition of the soundtrack to the theatrical production of Bridget Boland’s The Prisoner in 1954. Roberto Gerhard’s soundtrack to The Prisoner is likely the first piece to utilise ensemble and magnetic tape, and as such potentially the first live performance of musique concrète in England, taking place a year before Gerhard’s significantly more infamous electronic score to King Lear, produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company, and four years prior to the establishment of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. No master recording or score has been located and details relating to the soundtrack are sparse. This paper attempts to collect available documentation relating to this production, as well as provide new insights relating to potential draft materials stored in the Roberto Gerhard Tape Archive and a previously unknown connection between the production and Pierre Henry and the Groupe de Reserches de Musique Concrète.