Audience engagement with a sound work can extend beyond fixed conventions in which roles of creation and reception are separate. In an ‘open work’ these roles are blurred, and the audience takes on an active part of co-creation. Participatory sound works can be considered as ecologies of engagement rather than fixed compositions. Technologies of dissemination and interactivity have become part of the design of such ecologies, and sound artists have integrated them in highly diverse works. Two main aspects of participatory ecologies will be considered: the continuum of ‘active interpretation’ to ‘co-authorship’ and the creation of a community of intersubjectivity. These two aspects will be discussed in the context of a range of sound works, including the author's work Shadowgraphs (2009/11) and its interconnected manifestations: an installation, a live performance and a blog.

Public art invariably involves the drawing of individuals into the roles of audience and participant by virtue of it being in the public domain – in public places where those individuals are getting on with their everyday lives. As such, a large proportion of the ‘audience’ is an unwitting one, subjected to the art rather than subscribing to it. This is equally true of public sound art, where response to an intervention may vary from engagement to non-engagement to indifference to unawareness, along with a variety of transitional states between. This essay seeks to investigate this ambiguous territory in public sound art, proposing it both as an area rich in possibility for creative exploration and as a means by which artists may reveal and encourage sensitivity to the existing characteristics of a site (thus accommodating the pursuit of agendas relating to acoustic ecology). In particular it investigates and presents a case for the use of lowercase strategies in sound art as ways in which the public might be invited into a dialogue with works (invitation rather than imposition) and thus empowered as partakers of public sound art.

This paper presents an interactive sound design and interactive composition aesthetic. Three projects are presented as case studies and underline the importance of audience involvement: From snow [to space to movement] to sound (2011), Melodic walk (2012) and Points… (2012). All three projects have been designed, implemented and put in practice, and outline the aesthetic vision and approach of the authors. In the examples above, elements of interactive performance, sound installation and architectural design are blended together in order to deliver a sonic result, where the audience plays a central role. The members of the audience interact directly with the artworks, and as a result become part of the installation. Moreover, by bringing their own content into the interactive scenario, they also become contributors. The architectural space is an important parameter, as the spatial design is key to audience interaction with the music. Technical and aesthetic aspects are presented alongside the experiences of the audience/participants/contributors.

massMobile is a client-server system for large audience participation in live performances using mobile devices. It allows for rapid development, deployment and iterative experimentation in participatory design, while minimising technical and logistical overhead. It was designed to flexibly adapt to a variety of participatory performance needs and to a variety of performance venues. It allows for real-time bi-directional communication between performers and audiences utilising existing 3G, 4G or WiFi networks. Audience members access massMobile through a smartphone-optimised web application utilising common web standards. An offsite server passes data between the audience and the performer(s) and stores the data for later analysis. In this paper, we discuss the goals, design and implementation of the framework, and we describe several projects realised with massMobile.

This paper documents elements of a research project undertaken between 2008 and 2012. Building upon the Intention/Reception project of Leigh Landy (2006) and Rob Weale (2005), the project sought to investigate audience interpretations for works of electroacoustic audiovisual music and to utilise an expanded understanding of the audience – as active participants in interpretation – to subsequently inform the composition of new works. This project combined three distinct research methodologies: empirical data collection, scholarly research and composition. The composed works were both informed by the results of empirical data collection and scholarly research, and adapted (re-composed) throughout the latter stages of the research in order to explore emergent research findings and research hypotheses.

Interpretations were demonstrated to be contingent upon the individual lived experience of an audience member, with aspects of the work's discourse acting to narrow the interpretative potential of the work. The use of mimetic materials (sonic or visual) within works of electroacoustic audiovisual music were demonstrated to be potentially obstructing to an aesthetic interpretation of the work. And the importance of recognising the distinction between physical signal and perceived object was highlighted within the process of composition and the subsequent testing.

Adorno's theory of musical reproduction is unfinished, inconsistent and attuned only to score-based acoustic music – but it has relevance for electroacoustic performance as well. His theory prompts contemplation about what ‘good’ interpretation, and interpretation itself, means for fixed electroacoustic music. A digital sound file is frequently, if not typically, viewed as more rigid and precise than a score. This article uses Adorno's theory to compare ontologies of score and digital file realizations respectively, thus questioning the above assumption. Do electroacoustic works truly exist apart from their performed features, or is a given work only its performances? Different answers imply different work concepts and interpretive strategies. Toward the essay's goals, we examine three features often viewed as nonontological to an electroacoustic work, namely performed spatialisation, equalisation, and amplitude balance. We consider the impacts of these features when they are manipulated in real time, or performance to performance. As Adorno asks how choices of timing or dynamics dictate a notated work's aesthetic ‘clarity’, this paper asks how performed choices contribute to an electroacoustic work's clarity, and to the unique interpretive potential of electroacoustic music. Tape music and acousmatic music, with its diffusion tradition, are central to this paper's thesis; but multi-channel works are circumscribed by it as well.

In a musical context, the word ‘sound’ implies a set of sonic characteristics. Within popular music, this notion of sound sometimes supplies the very identity of a tune, a band or a musician. Sound is often conceptualised as a virtual space and in turn compared to actual spatial environments, such as a stage or an enclosed room. One possible consequence of this tendency is that this virtual space can become utterly surreal, displaying sonic features that could never occur in actual physical environments. This article concerns the ways in which the increased possibilities for creating a spatially surreal sound, thanks to new technological tools, have been explored within the field of popular music over the past few decades. We also look at the ways in which the effect of such features may have changed over time as a consequence of what we call processes of naturalisation. As a particularly interesting example of the complexity of such processes, we explore ‘the music sound stage’. In addition, we analyse three songs by Prince, Suede and Portishead to reveal the possibly surreal aspects of these productions.

If nineteenth-century aesthetics distinguish between distinct, colourful French instrumentation and doubled, equalised German orchestration, this distinction softens when the ‘New German’ orchestration of Wagner and Strauss exploits individual instrumental colours before dissolving them into massive orchestral sonorities. Similarly, if early French electroacoustic music counteracts the meta-serialism of early twentieth-century German electronic music, Pierre Schaeffer's Traité des objets musicaux combines his early anecdotal Noise Studies with a noise-reduction process into a new, rather German aesthetic of electroacoustics. In search of musical objects through a reductive, analytical listening (entendre), Schaeffer's neutralisation of anecdotal noises into musical objects is analogous to New German orchestration's neutralisation of individual orchestral colours in order to synthesise new orchestral combinations. Although this orchestral synthesis is different from the analytical probe for new valeurs involved in entendre, the separation of the noise from its residual signification are fundamental processes within both nineteenth-century orchestrational and twentieth-century electroacoustic musical aesthetics. If our current understanding of electronic music aligns Schaeffer and Pierre Henry wholly with modernity and its putatively radical and self-conscious break with Berlioz, Brahms and historical tradition, this article suggests that an essential underlying continuity in the French-instrumentation/German-orchestration binary persists even in the face of the decline of the musical and cultural traditions that created and sustained them.