This article is the final stage of seven years of research dedicated to understanding the theoretical backgrounds of Brazilian electroacoustic music in which a significant amount of data was gathered from a series of questionnaires and interviews with Brazilian composers. Our research focuses mainly on the influence of what we have called the historical matrices: musique concrète, elektronische musik and computer music. We were able to determine to some extent how much each of these matrices weigh on the poetic and poiesis of the Brazilian electroacoustic production. We were also able to shed some light on how (and if) Brazilian composers relate to these matrices aesthetically and if their relation to them is merely technical, as well as trying to understand how clear cut the borders are between these two aspects of musical creation. The concepts of oppositional culture (Ogbu 1978) and established and outsiders (Elias and Scotson 2000) also helped us understand the dynamics between academia and a certain anti-academic stance seen in some composers of the genre. Using these same concepts, we elaborate, in a final note, on some brief comments about a newer generation of composers who, due to various aspects, were filtered out during the early methodological stages.

This article posits the notion of the post-acousmatic. It considers the work of contemporary practitioners who are indebted to the Schaefferian heritage, but pursue alternative trajectories from the established canonical discourse of acousmatic music. It will outline the authors’ definition of the term and also outline a network of elements such as time, rhythm, pitch, dynamics, noise and performance to discuss work that the authors’ consider to be a critique, an augmentation and an outgrowth of acousmatic music and thinking.

This article attempts to explore working methods for developing hybrid tendencies within electroacoustic music compositions. These working methods, such as the novel concept of reconstructive sampling, are each explored with musical examples given. The article opens by giving definitions of genre, and then explores hybridisation as a concept through ideas developed by Duff (2000), Waters (2000) and Frow (2015). While the article focuses on the musical output of the author, personal compositions are placed in a broader context through the discussion of other artists within the wider field of electronic music composition.

In this article we discuss how contemporary computational and electronic music-making practices might be characterised as a post-digital avant-garde. We also discuss how practitioners within the higher education sector can play a role in leading the development of these practices through their research and teaching. A brief overview of twentieth-century avant-garde practices is provided to set the scene before a case for defining a post-digital avant-garde is made. By way of illustration, the authors describe their own post-digital creative practices and then discuss how these integrate into their academic duties. We reflect on themes that run through avant-garde practices and continue into the post-digital. Finally, we describe how these themes inform an undergraduate music technology programme such that it might be shaped to reflect these developments and prepare students for a post-digital future.

Real-time computer music is now common and ubiquitous, no longer a new or experimental practice. In its infancy, it helped to solve perceived issues with the fixity of tape pieces, a natural continuation in the practice of live electronics. However, real-time computer music did not have the same consequences as live electronic music. This situation engendered many discussions about the liveness of real-time computer music performances at the time. It is now 20 years past those first conversations, and it is important to revisit what is ‘live’ and how it applies to real-time musics. Additionally, in some ways, the language surrounding descriptions of fixed medium works, mixed works, live electronics and real-time computer music has evolved and, perhaps, even settled into conventions distinguishing musical approach and philosophies. This article first defines the language, not to proselytise, but rather to ground the argument. The conclusion asserts that liveness is a spectrum despite the fact that ‘live’ is often used categorically. Though one may have an intuitive understanding of what constitutes a ‘live’ event, this article explicitly articulates the most significantly contributive factors. The nature of real-time computer music is explored in relation to these factors of liveness. Using musical examples, this article shows that ‘real-time’ music does not guarantee a ‘live’ performance, contrary to what is typically held to be true. Instead, ‘real-time’ simply becomes a descriptor of compositional method, and any real-time work can exist along a broad range of the liveness spectrum.

This article investigates the approaches and attributes of publicly situated sound installations which have achieved the status of permanency, and have attracted ongoing local, and even international, visitors. The article draws on international fieldwork in 2015 that documented several enduring sound installations in the United States, UK and Europe. Through an inductive process including listening exercises, sound recordings, observations and interviews, the analysis identifies three approaches to creating sound installations and ten attributes of operative sound installations. It is argued that by encouraging public listening, the discussed sound installations successfully establish a sensory connection between people and their environments. By extension, it is argued that this emergent sense of place is commensurate with the installations’ capacity to augment a pre-existing ‘spirit of place’. These findings culminate in a sonic placemaking tool for situating sound art installations in urban spaces. It is suggested that urban planners and designers can apply the presented sonic placemaking tool to augment a site’s spirit of place, thereby affecting new experiences in everyday urban life.

When soundscape composers, documentarians and artists work with soundscapes, they are expressing relationships with the world, through their treatment of place, sounds and audience. A number of questions could be asked about these expressions about places, the ethics of these expressions, and the ways in which these ethics are informed by underlying ideologies of sound, of sound production and of sound ecology. One key question concerns a common distinction between ‘high-fidelity’ and ‘low-fidelity’. Are there some – possibly unintended or unexamined – ethical implications embedded in the dichotomisation of ‘hi-fi’ vs ‘lo-fi’ in soundscape theory? Is this really an essential or unavoidable concept and expression, or are there alternatives? One such possible alternative is found in the concept of the ecotone – a marginal zone, a transitional area or time where species from adjacent ecosystems interact. This leads us to an idea of ‘ecotonality’ that might offer a more flexible, less polarised, alternative to the hi-fi/lo-fi dichotomy. Finally, we will interrogate three themes around ideas of soundscape ’authenticity’: authenticity of place, authenticity of production and authenticity of connection.

Drawing on Deleuze’s work about cinema (the ‘movement-image’ and the ‘time-image’), this article explores formal and aesthetic resonances with sound-based music, distinguishing between aesthetics of energy, articulation and montage, and aesthetics of contemplation, space and virtual relations. A second perspective is given, focusing on how listening behaviours may impose a ‘movement-image’ or a ‘time-image’ lens through which we could experience and remember a work’s form. This is exemplified with a short analysis of the first section of Chat Noir (1998–2000) by Elizabeth Anderson.