This issue of Organised Sound is devoted to a conference, ‘Music without Walls? Music without Instruments’, which took place at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK in June of this year. It was hosted by the university's Music, Technology and Innovation Research Group. As one can easily discover, given the conference's title, the goal of this meeting was to investigate vision and plans for the future. The three-day event included papers, musical events, installations, demonstrations and a plenary. All artists whose pieces were selected for the conference concerts were requested to present vision papers to accompany their performance.

This conference talk is about change. It does not pretend to be an academic paper as such; it was offered at the ‘Music without Walls? Music without Instruments?’ conference as a provocative ‘performance’. The following pages investigate twenty-six developments associated with music that one might discover in the not-too-distant future.

It is recommended that we collaborate with science and industry in the search for technological innovation in media-related fields, in order to help design a future environment that will benefit a healthy musical culture. Since those of us who are already immersed in the technology are accustomed to its less attractive attributes as well as its potentials, we can consult with colleagues about essential characteristics of the old-fashioned world which we and they do not want to lose. With our collective imaginations, it should be possible to preserve many of these aspects by transforming them, with sensitivity, to fit new contexts. A few diverse examples are given of features that might be considered both attractive and endangered. Suggestions ranging from the practical to the whimsical illustrate some possibilities for injecting the essence of these experiences into a more technological world, thereby enriching it.

The author has written articles and papers on the possibilities of differentiated spaces in the composition of electroacoustic music (Emmerson 1994, 1998). He extends this into a more practical discussion on the spaces used for the presentation of electroacoustic music (acousmatic music and ‘live electronic’ music), sound installations and other sonic art. The move into more informal ‘club’ environments is not without controversy. The ‘sampling’ approach to the very act of listening and ‘consuming’ sonic art has challenged traditional concert hall presentation. This paper brings various possibilities into plans (at once conceptual but also intended to have practical application) for a multi-space ‘Sound House’: a centre for the performance of the sonic arts. This centre is socially embedded within interpersonal human interaction and is not to be found in the current performance possibilities of the Internet – though it may be connected to others of its kind through this means.

This paper describes an exploration of utilising the World Wide Web for interactive music. The origin of this investigation was the intermedia work Telemusic #1, by Randall Packer, which combined live performers with live public participation via the Web. During the event, visitors to the site navigated through a virtual interface, and while manipulating elements, projected their actions in the form of triggered sounds into the physical space. Simultaneously, the live audio performance was streamed back out to the Internet participants. Thus, anyone could take part in the collective realisation of the work and hear the musical results in real time. The underlying technology is, to our knowledge, the first standards-based implementation linking the Web with Cycling '74 MAX. Using only ECMAScript/JavaScript, Java, and the OTUDP external from UC Berkeley CNMAT, virtually any conceivable interaction with a Web page can send data to a MAX patch for processing. The code can also be readily adapted to work with Pd, jMAX and other network-enabled applications.

This paper will deal with the changes that have come about in the description of musical knowledge and with the ensuing needs in this field in the era of decentralisation. Throughout almost all the twentieth century, musical practices continued to be expressed by a system of cultural mediations that proved to be a practical impediment to the emergence of non-conventional cultures. Electronic music in particular and its corrosive tendencies, though spread and supported by remarkable composers, has ended up being devoured by academic immune systems. Now that the diffusion of Net computing has induced people to intervene in musical material, a poetics based on interference is spreading. By gaining ground on grammatical and self-referenced poetics, this trend has gradually become a palpable fact and music perceives itself as both individual writing and a production of social meaning. At present, a globe-net-transfer of sound material passes through different contexts and spaces, and seems to be adapting itself to different social speeds. Through the Net we can, on the one hand, replace, manipulate and recontextualise musical parameters until a different significance emerges; at the same time, randomising and hybridising musical objects can partially change our perception of the same musical events. On the other hand, music online databases, audio browsers and musical queries may open the way to overthrowing, reorganising and personalising music description. This could occur at different levels and to different degrees of complexity, both as a social event and as an active, user-based combination of musical structures.

This paper addresses the issues concerning the impact of music on cyberspace globalisation. It points out that Internet access is limited to only one per cent of the wealthiest human population. It also looks into the future of cyberspace music and predicts that most of the cyberspace activities are going to be unleashing one of many of humanity's predispositions – the predisposition to steal. Cyberspace represents a perfect medium for concealing a person's identity and for the masking of any of the responsibility that is expected from socially acceptable human behaviour. With these aspects in mind, the paper concentrates on the Internet's distribution of pirated software and the trading of MP3 files. The paper also focuses on commercial music whose economic impact on the development of music technology allows ‘academic musicians’ to appropriate most of the tools that otherwise would not have been developed for ‘academic’ use.

In this vision paper I will discuss a few questions concerning the use of generative processes in composition and automatic music creation. Why do I do it, and does it really work? I discuss the problems involved, focusing on the use of interactivity, and describe the use of interactive evolution as a way of introducing interactivity in composition. The installation MutaSynth is presented as an implementation of this idea.

In its original rendition, Degrees of Separation: “Grandchild of Tree” (1998) is performed with cactus, outboard digital effects, and CD playback, with simple lighting. The work is a metaphor which portrays subtle transformations (or transmutations) in human existence precipitated by pervasive new technology. A new version consists of a performance with a video component and all electronics fully automated in MAX/MSP on a Macintosh Powerbook. Development of this work, and subsequent versions, have proven invaluable for my own approach to the music I compose, and for the understanding of my position in the contemporary world of computers, technology and art. This paper attempts to describe these discoveries through outlining the levels of symbolism and metaphor in the work as realised through source abstraction (both visually and aurally), spatialisation and (re-)contextualisation. It begins with the question: What is a cactus doing in the concert hall?

In quantum mechanics a particle can behave like a particle or a wave. Thus, systems of particles can be likened to a superposition of waves. Since sound can be described as a superposition of frequencies, it can also be described in terms of a system of particles manifest as waves. This metaphor between ‘particle physics’ and sound synthesis is quantitatively developed here, suggested initially from some similarities between the two domains. It is applied to a few fundamental physical principles to show how these can be sonified. The author discusses the process of using a simulated ‘atom trap’ to compose a piece that does not require a physicist to appreciate it. This metaphor blurs the distinctions between science and art, where scientific experiment becomes musical composition, and exploring a musical idea involves playing with particle system dynamics. In the future, methods like these could be used with a real system of particles – the particle accelerator will become an expressive musical instrument, and the particle physicist will become the composerscientist.

The musical use of realtime digital audio tools implies the need for simultaneous control of a large number of parameters to achieve the desired sonic results. Often it is also necessary to be able to navigate between certain parameter configurations in an easy and intuitive way, rather than to precisely define the evolution of the values for each parameter. Graphical interpolation systems (GIS) provide this level of control by allocating objects within a visual control space to sets of parameters that are to be controlled, and using a moving cursor to change the parameter values according to its current position within the control space. This paper describes Interpolator, a two-dimensional interpolation system for controlling digital signal processing (DSP) parameters in real time.

We introduce a system for generalised sound classification and similarity using a machine-learning framework. Applications of the system include automatic classification of environmental sounds, musical instruments, music genre and human speakers. In addition to classification, the system may also be used for computing similarity metrics between a target sound and other sounds in a database. We discuss the use of hidden Markov models for representing the temporal evolution of audio spectra and present results of testing the system on classification and retrieval tasks. The system has been incorporated into the MPEG-7 international standard for multimedia content description and is therefore publicly available in the form of a set of standardised interfaces and software reference tools for developers and researchers.