This article describes a project intended to promote access to electroacoustic music for children and teenagers aged 6 to 15 years in a socially and educationally disadvantaged rural community in Michoacán, Mexico. It explores an educational model of teaching, learning and creation of electroacoustic music through the use of music technology and pedagogy based on constructivism and Paulo Freire’s ideas on education as a practice of freedom. It provides a pedagogical reflection on the processes of learning and appreciation of this new music. The project includes the use of an interactive music system – implemented in MaxMSP using a mobile phone OSC app to control space and its interaction with timbre, pitch and duration – as an aid in the classroom and its implementation in an educational programme with a social impact. The research covered in this article could be taken into account to deliver new music education in rural communities with similar socioeconomic circumstances.

This article will outline the experience of researchers at De Montfort University (DMU) (Leicester, UK) in devising and delivering workshops on sound-based creativity (sbc). These workshops supported and guided participants through the process of listening training, recording and composing their own sound-based pieces. As well as engaging participants in sound-based composition, the aim of these workshops was to introduce them to examples from the repertoire of sbm. The final workshops involved the collection of Intention/Reception (I/R) data from participants in response to a piece of sbm. Nearly 180 participants from a diverse range of ages and backgrounds took part in the workshops and the data indicate that engagement with sbm was high. This article will provide the context for the project, describe the methodology and analyse and evaluate the data that were collected. Finally, the implications for future work will be discussed.

With the invention of UPIC by Iannis Xenakis in 1977, for the first time one could achieve the sonic realisation of drawn musical ideas by a computer. Since then, no one seems to have proposed an equivalent tool, providing usability for both beginners and professionals. We will discuss how lively the UPIC idea can still be today, and why we should pay attention to this approach. Indeed, there has been a relative quietness in the domain of computer music specifically regarding how we arrange graphical curves to describe the evolution of sound parameters and create a musical form. This ascertainment led to the birth of our project UPISketch, which aims at the same goal, using today’s technology. We hope that this first version can reintroduce the concept of a ‘computer-assisted tool for sound composition, assisted by drawing’ to a global audience. The program being available since June 2018, we will evaluate the results of the first workshops with various publics and take a glimpse at the next developments.

The diverse practice of soundwalking is approached through its constituent parts (walking and listening) as an ideal ‘way in’ to the appreciation of new sonic art. It is argued that, because it engages the subject in a manner that encourages an aural perception of the environment not only as a physical space but also as a space of social and political tensions, divisions and flows, it can act as an experiential foundation for understanding how sound inflects our thoughts about and our relationships to agencies, human or not, that we interact with. This in turn renders possible modes of listening that are particularly adapted to contemporary forms of sonic art. Furthermore, soundwalking ties in to important contemporary discussions about participation, its potential for radical engagement of audiences and also the various forms of mediation it involves.

This article outlines a systematic process for developing the different knowledge domains required for teaching sound-based (electroacoustic) music as a new subject area. As a new area within the discipline of music, teachers are novices to the field. This requires epistemological deconstruction of what knowledge teachers need in this new field. Then the analysis outlines how to develop teachers’ new knowledge, which can be constructed as subject content knowledge (SCK), pedagogic content knowledge (PCK) and technology pedagogic content knowledge (TPACK). This epistemological analysis informed our creation of teaching materials that develop these different knowledge domains and take account of the complex interplay between them. This process was demonstrated through the ElectroAcoustic Resource Site Projects, which first built subject content knowledge and then created teacher’s packs to build pedagogic content knowledge, and a bespoke CPD programme, which embedded their inter-relationships and built technology pedagogic content knowledge. Most importantly, creating the teacher’s packs employed a user-centred design approach, putting teachers and pupils in the centre of the development process, thereby giving them voice. Voice is an integral part of empowerment in our model, which disrupts the hegemonic grip of the academic curriculum dominated by the traditional music canon. This article adds to the knowledge-base regarding how to develop the different domains required for teaching a new subject. We argue that sound-based music is accessible to all teachers and learners, thereby increasing inclusivity. This in turn can radically disrupt ways of teaching music in schools and the model created provides the necessary scaffolding for a paradigm shift in music teaching on an international level.

In this article, I consider implications of outreach practices in the field of contemporary music for the field itself and for the professional artists involved. I am interested in what happens if we facilitate access to contemporary music for audiences of any kind of demographic, break down barriers, share authority between participating non-professionals and professional artists and allow all participants of a project influence on jointly created artworks. I investigate in how far the organisational or structural change in the creative practice and the creative outcome – that comes along with bringing new players into the field – has consequences on the personal practice of the professional actors in such a project. I base my article on theories of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, communication scholar Henry Jenkins, art historian Claire Bishop, musicologist Elena Ungeheuer and my own research into social structures of the contemporary art field, and apply them to a single case study: the artistic research project TransCoding – From ‘Highbrow Art’ to Participatory Culture, funded by the Austrian Science Fund. Using the method of thick description, I take the reader through the history of TransCoding, give account of field experiences and put the found patterns of cultural-social experiences into a theoretical context. I investigate the power shifts from professional artists to audience that occurred on the basis of creative, participatory processes within this project. In doing so, I would like to raise questions and stimulate discussion with regard to the conditions and social organisations of creative practice in the contemporary music field, the distribution of power and how this is felt when ‘bringing new audiences to new music’ into the core practice of professional artists, the actual creation of a new work.

This article discusses the importance of active listening when engaging new audiences with experimental and unfamiliar musical formats. Spatial music is examined as a physically immersive medium in which the audience is implicated as an active component in the execution of its performance. A brief account of the historic context of spatial music will be presented alongside speculation for the trajectory of its future; particularly its potential as a model for audience engagement. This article will first consider how spatially immersive performances have the capacity to activate listeners and how can this help to engage new audiences with new ways of listening. It will also question the notion of inhabiting spatial music, with an investigation of the multiple ways in which spatial music relates to physical space and the terms of its inhabitation. The concept of virtual listening will be discussed in response to trends towards passive hearing, as driven by recent technological developments in acoustic software and hardware, and the resultant abstraction of the spatial and social dynamics of sound in virtual space. The physiological and psychological differences between listening and hearing will also be examined as a means of establishing fundamental differences in the ways that we interact with music, and questioning what our listening habits tell us about audience engagement in the context of experimental music performance. This article will also question the individual roles of the musician, composer, architect/designer and audience in the ongoing responsibility to improve audience engagement in new, or unfamiliar musical works. Importantly, this article will also explicitly examine who we are referring to when we use the term ‘new audiences’. Major developments in acoustic technology during the last few decades have somewhat confused the diagram between music, space and listener. The understanding of which elements are active and which are passive is especially ambiguous at a time when ambisonic and binaural technologies have become developed enough to provide accurate simulations of the abstract, acoustic qualities of spaces, but on virtual terms. Architects, composers, musicians, engineers and audiences are at a crossroads in the development of new music and experimental, spatiosonic practice. ‘Spatiosonic’ is a hybrid term which is used throughout this article to describe work and phenomena which regard space (spatio) and sound (sonic) as equal, interactive partners. This article considers some of the opportunities and limitations at stake in current techniques of composition, performance and listening.

This article explores the accessibility of acousmatic compositional approaches to sound and installation art. Principally of concern is the consideration of intimacy to create a means of ‘connecting’ with an audience. Installations might be said to explore ideas of intimacy in two ways which increase accessibility for the installation visitor: through cultivating installation–visitor relationships, and through encouraging visitor–visitor relationships. A variety of ways in which various acousmatic compositional techniques relating to intimacy might be brought to bear on and operate as a way of drawing a listener into a work are explored, in particular as they relate to the consideration of space and spatial relationships. These include recording techniques, types of sound materials chosen, and the creation of particular spatial environments and listening conditions. Along with a number of instances of sound art provided by way of examples, my ongoing GRIDs series of sound sculptures will provide a case study of works related to an acousmatic aesthetic where these concerns find an outlet.

This article focuses on the analysis of computer music, that is, music which uses programming languages so that what the listener hears is the result of computer code. One key point in this article is that this music exists with some writing, that is, the computer code. I note that this key point has not been addressed in the latest theories for analysing computer music. Indeed, we often see this music as part of the electroacoustic field, where the audio signal is essential, and where we usually read that those musics are non-written music. After an introduction on this topic, in the second section I will make a distinction between ‘before the signal’ and ‘from the signal’ to organise the theories to analyse electroacoustic music. In the third section, I will focus on computer music and I will show the historical difficulty in considering ‘code’ in musical analysis, mainly with an important exchange between two pioneers, Marco Stroppa and Jean-Claude Risset. In the fourth section I will explain with Jean-Claude Risset and Horacio Vaggione the specificity of computer music: this music is written. Finally, I will look into a recent analysis theory, the Interactive Aural Analysis by Michael Clarke, which seems to fit with the latter specificity.