The ZKM|Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe is called Center because it is a museum and more than a museum. As a museum it has a classical museological function as a support and distribution system: Collection and archive, exhibitions and events. But in addition to it, the ZKM has two institutes for research, development and production (Institute for Music and Acoustics and Institute for Visual Media). The ZKM is a center for all media and for all art forms created in the 20th century. The machine based moving image has shifted the image from the classical position as space based art to time based art. Therefore the ZKM is the only museum of the world that integrated the mother of time based art, namely music, in his permanent collection and in its temporary exhibitions. This article describes the logic in the evolution of modern art, which is followed by the mission statement of the ZKM.

The overall concept for a Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie in Karlsruhe positioned music as integral part of it from the very beginning in 1985. The following text does not list accomplishments by discussing individual works, productions and research projects; this report describes and contextualises what happened and how it happened, it talks of people and concepts, of politics and ideas. It tries to illuminate the complex path between politics and technology, individual interests and cultural perspectives that led to and shaped ZKM. The uniqueness of ZKM is not only that it comprises museums as well as institutes, which actively produce art. The uniqneness of ZKM also lies in that music was planned as an equally important partner in the original concept, and that the Institute for Music and Acoustics still holds a major position in the institution today even though ZKM as a whole shifted towards the dominance of visual media. The focus of this text is on how the Institute for Music and Acoustics forms an integral part of ZKM as a whole while evolving its own inner direction and dynamics.

Twenty years after the founding of the Karlsuhe ZKM | Center for Art and Media and its Institute for Music and Acoustics, we reexamine the institute’s position with regard to both aesthetic approaches and the 20 years of a reunified Germany. When the broadcasting corporations in West Germany decided to discontinue support for all of their electronic music studios except the Southwest German Radio’s Experimental Studio in Freiburg, the Institute for Music and Acoustics took on a special role that also had an impact on the course of music history in former East Germany. Together with the studio at the Berlin Academy of the Arts, the Institute became a studio for electroacoustic art that served the whole of Germany, though financed by local funding from the City of Karlsruhe and regional funding from the state of Baden-Württemberg. One of the artistic themes pursued at the ZKM’s Institute for Music and Acoustics is the combination of instruments and voice with electronics, for both theatrical settings and purely concert performances. The aspect of real-time composition gives rise to a lasting alteration of the performance situation and the character of the work produced.

The ZKM | Karlsruhe has been producing work now for 20 years. The Institute for Music and Acoustics in particular has commissioned, produced or co-produced approximately 400 works in this time. The Institute’s work takes place within a very active but also very complex environment in Germany, one which often repudiates the use of technology and its accompanying shift in the aesthetic paradigm. The following text will shed light on the work of the ZKM | Karlsruhe in general and the various activities of the Institute for Music and Acoustics (IMA) in particular. These activities encompass the areas of production, presentation, publication and research. To this end, the article will touch upon the IMA’s primary research projects, in particular the archiving project Mediaartbase (Brümmer, Heidenreich, Haecker et al. 2009), the development of software and hardware in the context of spatial music, and a number of interface developments. Reasons will be discussed that substantiate the significance of spatial music with regard to the reception of music in the future, and the role of new interfaces in future musical activities will be described.

Zirkonium is a flexible, non-invasive, open-source program for sound spatialisation over spherical (dome-shaped) loudspeaker setups. By non-invasive, we mean that Zirkonium offers the artist spatialisation capabilities without forcing her to change her usual way of working. This is achieved by supporting a variety of means of designing and controlling spatialisations. Zikonium accommodates user-defined speaker distributions and offers HRTF-based headphone simulation for situations when the actual speaker setup is not available. It can acquire sound sources from files, live input, or via the so-called device mode, which allows Zirkonium to appear to other programs as an audio interface. Control data may be predefined and stored in a file or generated elsewhere and sent over OSC. This paper details Zirkonium, its design philosophy and implementation, and how we have been using it since 2005.

In this text, the author argues that space should be considered as important a musical parameter in acousmatic music composition as more conventional musical parameters in instrumental music. There are aspects of sound spatialisation that can be considered exclusive to the acousmatic language: for example, immersive spatialisation places listeners in an environment where they are surrounded by speakers. The author traces a history of immersive spatialisation techniques, and describes the tools available today and the research needed to develop this parameter in the future. The author presents his own cycle of works within which he has developed a new way to compose for a spatial parameter. He calls this technique timbre spatialisation.

This article discusses the installations that have been produced at the ZKM | Institute for Music and Acoustics since 1997. The first part of the article will present common characteristics of these installations. The primary quality the installations share is their orientation towards interactivity. Some installations additionally distinguish themselves through their relationship to (computer) games, for example, while others are characterised by their suitability for use as didactic tools. The second part of the article will describe the installations individually and highlight their unique features.

This paper reports a study that sought to discover the necessary aural skills for composing, performing, and understanding electroacoustic (EA) music and the extent of their teachability by traditional aural training according to an analysis of a mixed-method (qualitative/quantitative) questionnaire completed by a purposive sample of 15 experts in the field of electroacoustics. The participants evaluated a list of 50 potentially necessary aural skills, which were gathered from skills described in existing, but insufficiently applied, aural training systems and theoretical methods related to aural perception in EA, and provided additional skills they found necessary for EA. The survey revealed that the aural skills deemed the most necessary for EA by the participants were not regarded as sufficiently teachable by traditional aural training and the majority of the skills considered teachable by traditional aural training were not thought of as significantly necessary for the EA musician. Moreover, among the 50 skills listed in the questionnaire 56 per cent were deemed at least very necessary by the participants, with only 18 per cent of them viewed as sufficiently teachable by traditional aural training. The main implication of this study is a pressing need for further development, research, and experimental testing of aural training methods for EA.

In volume 12, number 2 of Organised Sound, we presented a revision of Pierre Schaeffer’s spectromorphology adapted to practical analysis. The present paper shows the steps of applying the proposed method of analysis to a specific work by the Swedish composer Åke Parmerud, as we pursue the application of two other central terms in Schaffer’s analytical work, namely ‘caractère’ and ‘valeur’. Whereas ‘sound-character’ would refer only to a timbral constant that supports pertinent values, we identify a form-building entity, termed integral sound-character, consisting of a union of sound-character and its temporal behaviour.