This article reflects on significant technological, musical and cultural processes that took place since Varèse envisioned the concept of organised sound: understanding these processes may provide a strategic vantage point from which to gain insight into our evolving attitude to modern aesthetic and technological development and thus formulate informed strategic decisions concerning our relationship with the latter. The discussion begins by focusing on technological processes, including accelerated change, cycles of enhancement, obsolescence, retrieval and reversal, and the non-neutrality of technology. This is followed by a focus on musical issues resulting from the decoupling of sound control from sound production, interactivity, the expansion towards time-based media and the possible active role of audiences in the realisation of music. Discussion is then posited within the wider cultural context of modernism and the postmodern era, the eroding popular/art divide and the obsolescence of music as a cultural artefact resulting from technological change. This leads to the conclusion, which identifies tentative learning outcomes that may be helpful in formulating future strategic decisions.

This article describes a manual actions expressive system (MAES) which aims to enable music creation and performance using natural hand actions (e.g. hitting virtual objects, or shaking them). Gestures are fully programmable and result from tracking and analysing hand motion and finger bend, potentially allowing performers to concentrate on natural actions from our daily use of the hands (e.g. the physical movement associated with hitting and shaking). Work carried out focused on the development of an approach for the creation of gestures based on intuitive metaphors, their implementation as software for composition and performance, and their realisation within a musical composition through the choice of suitable mappings, sonic materials and processes.

This article is a development, refinement and expansion of a paper presented at the Electroacoustic Music Studies Conference, 2007 (EMS07). It aims to provide a framework and terminology for the discussion, analysis and creation of music that articulates mimetic discourse and structure. In doing so, it also intends to enable parallel and complementary analytical approaches to those concerned with the aural and spatial aspects of musical articulation. It proposes the notion of multidimensional mimetic space, taking as its point of departure Emmerson's Language Grid (Emmerson 1986), and constructing additional axes representing compositional continua, similar in function to those proposed by spectromorphology (Smalley 1986), but applicable to mimetic material. The argument considers the mimetic implications of both purely acousmatic music and works that combine the acousmatic with live performance. After a brief consideration of the relationship between mimetic space and space-form (Smalley 2007a), the discussion concludes with a perspective on narrative as a component of mimetic space; providing an extensive discussion of issues pertinent to the idea of signifier space, which was originally introduced in the preceding paper.

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.

This article presents a full analysis of Crosstalk – a piece for tape by Michael Vaughan (1989). The methodological approach employed here develops its concepts and techniques from those of Music Semiology and Spectromorphology. The former provides the concept and method of semiological neutral inference – as applied by Nattiez (1982, 1990). The latter – developed by Smalley (1986) – offers tools and a terminology for the characterisation of timbre and temporal functionality within the musical work.

This article discusses the theoretical principles governing the short time Fourier transform (STFT) and its musical applications, using the CARL phase vocoder and the Composers' Desktop Project (CDP) spectral transformations. The former was originally developed by Dolson (1986, 1991) and ported to personal computer systems by Atkins, Bentley, Henderson, Orton and Wishart (Atkins, Bentley, Endrich, Fischman, Malham, Orton and Wishart 1987, Wishart 1994a). The latter was developed by Wishart (1994b). When possible, theoretical matters are presented in a qualitative way, keeping the number and complexity of mathematical expressions within the essential requirements for those interested in musical applications. The latter are accompanied by sound examples, including excerpts from pieces by the author.