This article investigates the recent resurgence of kinetic sound art in light of the relationship between art and material. It does this by studying the history of mechanical musical instruments and kinetic art, the role of immateriality in the history of Western art, and the renewed focus on materiality in the arts. Materiality is key to understanding the resurgence of kinetics in sound art. The first part of this article studies the historical narratives of materiality in sound art, while the second part investigates materiality in my own works as more contemporary examples. Here the text turns to exploration of the material and acoustic properties of metal rods and plates, and suggests that direct contact with sound-producing objects provides opportunities for new art forms where the morphology of sound can be developed in dialogue with the physical objects and the surrounding space. By examining the underlying acoustic principles of rods and plates, we get a deeper understanding of the relationship between mathematical models and the actual sounding objects. Using the acoustic model with basic input parameters enables us to explore the timbral possibilities of the sound objects. This allows us to shape the spectrum of acoustic sound objects with great attention to detail, and makes models from spectromorphology relevant during the construction of the objects. The physical production of sound objects becomes both spectral composition and shaping of spatial objects. This highlights the importance of knowledge of both materials and acoustic principles, and questions the traditional perception of sound art and music as immaterial art forms.

Western audiences have long been fascinated with music automata. Against this backdrop, it may not be surprising that art and music curators display historical examples of such mechanical instruments together with contemporary sounding art. Yet what exactly do these curators aim to accomplish when combining historical music automata with kinetic sound art? And do visitors understand the connections between the objects on display in the ways intended by the curators? To examine the curators’ ambitions, this article analyses three exhibitions: Für Augen und Ohren (West Berlin 1980), Ballet Mécanique (Maastricht 2002) and Art or Sound (Venice 2014). To unravel visitors’ responses, we focus on the Berlin exhibition, the best documented case. We argue that the curators staged the automated kinetic as a key historical link between mechanical musical instruments and contemporary sound art, and that they tried to tap into specific dimensions of public fascination with musical automata – the magical invisible, mechanical wonder and blurring of boundaries – to open their audiences’ senses to sound art. As we will show with the help of the notion of ‘listening habitus’, visitors’ responses indeed drew on these dimensions, but more often than not displayed a preference for the historical automata rather than contemporary kinetic art.

As a consequence of the universal alphabet of binary code, music is expanding to include transmedia practices. This text suggests that the seemingly exclusive bond between the art form of music and its primary medium, sound, might be opened up to include other media. If the practices of composers who also appear as sound- and kinetic artists are not recognised as music, possible contemporary perspectives on past music is lost and the future development of music is inhibited.

The author presents an artistic perspective on transmediality, where two questions are addressed. The first is whether or not a transmedial structure can be made with light, movement and sound – and if so, how is this done? A strategy for transmedial composition with light, sound and movement is proposed, and exemplified with hand drawings. The second question raised in this article concerns whether or not transmedial compositions result in music. An idea of music as organised time is developed, and includes a discussion on the exclusive relation between art form and medium, especially between sound and music.

This article shows how the theremin as a new musical medium enacted a double logic throughout its century-old techno-cultural life. On the one hand, in an attempt to be a ‘better’ instrument, the theremin imitated or remediated traditional musical instruments and in this way affirmed the musical values these instruments materialised; simultaneously, by being a new and different medium, with unprecedented flexibility for designing sound and human–machine interaction, it eroded and challenged these same values and gradually enacted change. On the other hand, the theremin inadvertently inaugurated a practice of musical instrument circulation using electronics schematics that allowed for the instrument’s reproduction, starting with the publication of schematics and tutorials in amateur electronics magazines and which can be seen as a predecessor to today’s circulation of open source code. This circulation practice, which I call instrument-code transduction, emerged from and was amplified by the fame the theremin obtained using its touchless interface to imitate or remediate traditional musical instruments, and in turn, this circulation practice has kept the instrument alive throughout the decades. Thus remediation and code-instrument transduction are not just mutually dependent, but are in fact, two interdependent processes of the same media phenomenon. Drawing from early reactions to the theremin documented in the press, from new media theory, and from publications in amateur electronics, this article attempts to use episodes from the history of the theremin to understand the early and profound changes that electric technologies brought to the concept of musical instruments at large.

OB-scene is a performance centred on a live sonification of biological data gathered in real-time with a medical vaginal probe (photoplethysmograph), made by the author. The use of the photoplethysmograph, which takes inspiration from the first medical vaginal probes used for diagnostic purposes by Masters and Johnson (1966) introduces a media-archaeological aspect to this work. Data gathered through the probe is processed and transformed into sound and visuals projected in the exhibition space. OB-scene takes inspiration from Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter (2010) in which she argues that human agency has echoes in non-human nature and vice versa, shifting away from anthropocentrism towards the concept of ‘vital materiality’ that runs across bodies, both humans and unhuman. Furthermore, OB-scene is affiliated with an emerging movement of women and technology called ‘XenoFeminism’ (XF). It introduces the idea of techno-alienation and focuses on the concept of other/diverse desires, new forms of desiring, experiencing something other (Laboria Cuboniks 2015). In this specific work, this takes the form of a technofeminism incorporating the fluid, the non-human and the diverse. In this performance, the body is fused with the technology, rather than empowered or enhanced by technology itself, body and technology become a unique actant (Latour 2009) enabling the audience to experience the sensorial assemblage as a space for communal experience with political implications. OB-scene is as an immersive environmental work where the senses, affect and memory were key features of ‘assemblage thinking’ (Hamilakis 2017).

I have taken the ambiguous psychology of Kinaesthetic Empathy and the relatively recent ideas that form Extended Mind Theory and re-contextualised them so they are relevant to sound-based live performance. I then used these psychologies as a guidance to investigate how we interact with discreet and invasive instruments by analysing specific examples of performance, sound installation and composition. I have defined ‘invasive and discreet’ by using examples of how these instruments are presented as objects in the context of performance. For example, the way in which an object or system can physically invade, and make use of, the performance space when employing technology and physical sculpture; or how an object or system can interact with the performer through tactility and psychological presence. During the process of defining discreet and invasive instruments I noted that there is no binary differentiation because the instruments denotation is dependent on context, sound palette and how they are interpreted as objects for creative expression by the performer. I concluded that the physicality of invasive instruments gives strength to the presentation of ideas in live performance. This is in opposition to discrete instruments which I argue are better suited to studio production or acousmatic performance.

This article explores the sense of proprioception within visual mental imagery. The research is based on an experiment named In/Pe (Intention/Perception) developed by the author. The analysis of the data investigates the perception by an audience of architectural spaces, as well as natural environments, in visual mental imageries, emerging from a focused listening process of three fixed-medium pieces, one sound installation and one performance. This highlights the idea of the experience of the artwork as a virtual constructed perception within one’s mind, an embodied experience that triggers the phenomenal world of sensation. The study examines what kind of spaces are visualised by the ‘beholder’. The overall agreement in how participants imagine spaces suggests that the perception is linked to their own bodies.

Benoit Maubrey’s work with audio art started in Berlin in 1982 with public sound sculptures, and he eventually turned to performative practices with portable audio embedded in clothes and costumes. His artistic practice currently spans site-specific and non-site-specific sound installations, locational and non-locational performances, as well as performed, interactive and non-interactive sound installations, and a comprehensive description of his artistic trajectory is planned for release in 2019: Benoit Maubrey – Sound Sculptures. His most well-known ensemble is The Audio Ballerinas, wearing tutus with a combination of solar cells, light sensors, samplers, radios, amplifiers and loudspeakers. The ensemble has been performing since its debut in Lille in 1990. Maubrey has developed a huge portfolio of audio ensemble performances on several continents, and an interesting thread of autonomy and critical reflection is running through his oeuvre. The costumes and their technical affordances have changed with new technological developments, and in this interview Maubrey explains these developments, and how he has maintained and extended his artistic focus.

This research introduces different compositional techniques involving the use of sound spatialisation. These permit the incorporation of sound distortions produced by the real space, the body and the auditory system into low-, middle- and large-scale musical structures, allowing sound spatialisation to become a fundamental parameter of the three compositions presented here. An important characteristic of these pieces is the exclusive use of sine waves and other time-invariant sound signals. Even though these types of signals present no alterations in time, it is possible to perceive pitch, loudness and tone-colour variations when they move in space, due to the psychoacoustic processes involved in spatial hearing. To emphasise the perception of such differences, this research proposes dividing a tone into multiple sound units and spreading these in space using several loudspeakers arranged around the listener. In addition to the perception of sound attribute variations, it is also possible to create dynamic rhythms and textures that depend almost exclusively on how sound units are arranged in space. Such compositional procedures help to overcome to some degree the unnaturalness implicit when using synthetic-generated sounds; through them, it is possible to establish cause–effect relationships between sound movement, on the one hand, and the perception of sound attribute, rhythm and texture variations on the other. Another important consequence is the possibility of producing diffuse sound fields independently of the levels of reverberation in the room, and to create sound spaces of a particular spatial depth without using artificial delay or reverb.