This theoretical article investigates context-based compositions where we cannot identify the real-world context from the sounds alone. Examples include Stephen Vitiello’s World Trade Center Recordings: Winds After Hurricane Floyd, Jana Winderen’s The Noisiest Guys on the Planet, Jacob Kirkegaard’s 4 Rooms, Christina Kubisch’s compositions based on observations of the Ruhr district, Anne Niemetz and Andrew Pelling’s The Dark Side of the Cell (2004) as well as Andrea Polli’s Heat and Heartbeat of the City (2004) based on weather data from New York. The article asks how these compositions establish their relation to a specific context. How do they invite the listener to include his or her knowledge of specific contexts? The article suggests four relevant terms that are useful when studying this relation between text and context: paratext, intermediality, enunciation and mediality.

Contemporary trains of thought largely denounce hylomorphism and a series of dichotomies of the past in favour of rather hybrid, all-inclusive and non-anthropocentric schemata. Yet, the former seem to still pervade our understanding of music and sound art in several respects. For many, composition is a primarily abstract process, musical instruments and audio-related technologies are fixed material means, and artists are creative individuals who are solely and primarily responsible for the artworks they produce. In this article a series of ad hoc and context-dependent compositional traits are scrutinised, with reference to theory as well as to actual artistic practice (both historical and contemporary), and are shown to transcend such assumptions in more or less straightforward ways. In particular, a series of practices is examined that revolves around material inquiry, anti-optimality, and hybrid, reflexive or ‘meta’ interfaces. More, DIWO (Do It With Others) approaches to composition are discussed and shown to echo adhocracy and contextual dependency in various respects and by means of emergent autopoiesis. Certain slants to DIWO are finally examined with respect to a series of powerful (in the author’s opinion) metaphors, namely emergence, transience and post-selfhood.

This article discusses the affordances of soundscape composition and how the techniques and approaches of this genre have been embraced as an inter-disciplinary research methodology. Since its emergence from the World Soundscape Project, the concept of soundscape composition has set out to enhance our listening awareness of our soundscapes, inspiring and establishing a discourse that explores a sense of place through sound. Soundscape composition over the past decades has established itself as a popular compositional practice among acousmatic composers utilising compositional techniques that go beyond phonographic representation of acoustic environments. Electroacoustic techniques explore not only the transformation and processing of field recordings but also the spatialisation and performance techniques used to create immersive and realistic soundscapes. These compositional developments since the establishment of the World Soundscape Project have brought this genre of music to a wider audience as it has developed into a cross-disciplinary practice. Soundscape studies methodologies such as soundwalking, listening and recording are being utilised by a broader research cohort outside of soundscape composition. This article provides a survey of recent projects and compositions that incorporate a soundscape and cross-disciplinary approach that reflects a variety of cultural themes and issues within the disciplines of social, political and cultural science.

This article explores our audiovisual collaborative outputs and the methods employed to negotiate converging and diverging creative directions in the production of artistic works, in the context of philosophies that influence our thinking-making processes, as well the engagement with new modes of artistic practice. A key feature connecting our collaborations is site-specific field recordings of audio and visual materials. Our work has spanned Canada, the United States and New Zealand, producing a catalogue of works that are intrinsically linked to geographic and everyday phenomena. To support our discussion of the creative process, we critique one recent work, Aspects of Trees (2013, 2015), as a case study that synthesises concerns associated with collaboration, while also illustrating the recent sharp turn in our individual practices. The outcome is a reorientation of our thinking-making procedures, including ideas of subjective experiences of time, place and the agency of human and non-human bodies.

Cheryl E. Leonard is a San Francisco-based composer, performer and instrument maker who utilises sounds from natural objects and field recordings to create innovative compositions that are aesthetically appealing and also promote environmental awareness. This article examines Leonard’s work Antarctica: Music from the Ice (2009–2014), which comprises ten context-based pieces created from sounds produced with natural objects (such as penguin bones, rocks and shells) and field recordings the composer collected during her visit to Antarctica in 2008–9. In particular, the article focuses on the pieces Lullaby for E Seals, White on White, Greater than 20 Knots and Ablation Zone, showing how Leonard draws attention to pertinent environmental issues through her work, while at the same time producing compositions that are aurally pleasing and engaging for performers and listeners alike.

This article proposes a framework as a contribution to the expansion of compositional practice. It analyses and problematises different dimensions of architectural thinking and practice, and transposes them to the field of music. This way it suggests and develops compositional strategies that are more deeply engaged with the several spatialities of music creation, performance and listening. Material, site, drawing, programme and use operate as conceptual tools to articulate music and architecture in a discussion towards a more comprehensive understanding of music composition. This was the theoretical ground of a practice-based PhD research in which I developed a portfolio of works. I will describe some of these to contextualise and demonstrate the contemporary relevance of this framework.

A range of material objects can be transformed into sound emitters by the induction of audio-rate vibration with structure-borne sound drivers. The resulting acoustically activated physical objects offer the possibility to extend the compositional gesture towards the material environment, providing a literal re-reading of Schaeffer’s objet sonore concept. Engaging sound in physical objects ties the creative gesture to its surroundings, grounding the approach in an inherently situated dimension. This article examines the compositional strategies emerging from diffusing sound via physical objects, such as sound spatialisation, audiovisual sculpture and audiotactility in concert setting, illustrated by four case studies of recent aural artwork. On the basis of the case studies, the aesthetic implications of materially mediated aural art are discussed, in relation with the ideal of purity represented by the high-fidelity loudspeaker. While the technological development of the loudspeaker aims for a perfect reproduction of an idealised and autonomous sound, materially mediated sound diffusion merges sound and matter into an agglomerate where the sound can no longer be perceived as an autonomous entity, but rather in relation to its material source. Engaging electronic musicianship in materiality gives rise to a hybrid setting at the interface of the digital, the material and the human, where the context – the environment of sound-emitting objects – becomes an object of composition.

With similarities to the emergence in fifteenth-century landscape paintings, to poems by the Transcendentalists and to the more recent 1960s land art movement, environmental sonic art is always context-based and conjointly performs as environmental activism with aims to break down the nature/culture dualism. Nature, however, is both a material object and a socially constructed metaphor that is infinitely interpretable and ideologically malleable based on one’s values and biases. Does the environmental sonic artist acknowledge this? The theoretical framework of this article extends acoustic ecology, first theorised by R. Murray Schafer, to include environmental history and cultural theory – ultimately problematising definitions of ‘nature’ and ‘natural.’ Through this framework, the author critiques the way composer John Luther Adams represents his environmental sonic art. This analysis will illuminate a dialogue that asks, ‘What is self-critical environmental sonic art?’

This analysis explores how Barry Truax’s Song of Songs (1992) for oboe d’amore, English horn and two digital soundtracks reorients prevailing norms of sexuality by playing with musical associations and aural conventions of how gender sounds. The work sets the erotic dialogue between King Solomon and Shulamite from the biblical Song of Solomon text. On the soundtracks we hear a Christian monk’s song, environmental sounds (birds, cicadas and bells), and two speakers who recite the biblical text in its entirety preserving the gendered pronouns of the original. By attending to established gender norms, Truax confirms the identity of each speaker, such that the speakers seemingly address one another as a duet, but the woman also addresses a female lover and the man a male. These gender categories are then progressively blurred with granular time-stretching and harmonisation (which transform the timbre of the voices), techniques that, together, resituate the presumed heteronormative text within a diverse constellation of possible sexual orientations.

A significant body of academic literature and music journalism has explored the historical trajectory of Jamaican dub music and its innovative use of audio recording technology. The present article seeks to demonstrate the similarities between the studio compositional methods of Jamaican dub innovator King Tubby and those of Canadian soundscape composers Barry Truax and Hildegard Westerkamp. Rather than attempting to identify aesthetic and stylistic similarities between Tubby’s dub music and soundscape composition, this article presents a comparative analysis of dub in relation to soundscape composition focusing on artistic articulations of contextual meaning and acoustic communication. Specifically, this work argues that Tubby’s compositional approach directly addresses the following conceptual themes common in soundscape composition: 1) referential composition and the invocation of past listening associations through sonic abstraction, 2) timbral play as a means of linking sound processing to acoustic communication, and 3) the evocation of real-world motion cues by way of ecologically informed sound-processing effects. Exploring the conceptual similarities between Tubby’s work and the established academic-affiliated genre of soundscape composition provides a new perspective on his work as reflecting a multifaceted musical approach that warrants further scholarly study.

In this article I propose the use of extended phonography as an integrated practice which offers the opportunity to overcome the fragmentation of the senses inherent in field recording. I outline how listening across practices empowers both recordist and audience to experience a richer engagement with the recorded environment. Furthermore, I introduce new forms of articulating the experience of place and its relationship to sound, by highlighting the conceptual framework of two of my contrasting works, the site/context-specific projects Moving Still: 1910 Avenida Atlântica, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and X Marks the Spot. These works, both artistic and discursive, are a direct outcome of my practice of extended phonography. Through them, I attempt to address the need for a vocabulary that mirrors the new aesthetics arising in sound art and further expand the practice of field recording.

This article discusses the inclusion of concrete informative elements within acousmatic music, in an attempt to mix acousmatic music and sound documentary into a form of socially engaged sound art. Inspired by existing sound practices that make strong use of the sonic reality, such as soundscape composition or radiophonic art, the authors explain how they aim to address socially relevant topics within pieces where music and information are considered of equal importance. To that end, they give a detailed description of their approach through the analysis of the composition process behind Archipel (Côté and Campion 2016), a 29-minute piece focused on the access to the waterfront in the city of Montréal, Québec. Through an alloy of interviews, sound recordings gathered on the shores of Montréal and typically acousmatic sound-processing and synthesis, the piece attempts to portray the challenges and opportunities encompassed by this topic. Having found the need to go beyond the acousmatic concert format for this kind of work, the authors also briefly discuss how they are currently expanding the project to include an interactive website and a mobile application that will complement the initial concert piece.

This article discusses a range of self-reflexive tendencies in field recording, soundscape composition and studio production, and explores examples of sonic practices and works in which the personal listening experiences of the composer are a key contextual and compositional element. As broad areas for discussion, particular attention is given to soundscape composition as self-narrative (exploring the representation of the recordist in soundscape works) and to producing the hyperreal and the liminal (considering spatial characteristics of contemporary auditory experience and their consequences for sonic practice). The discussion then focuses on the specific application of autoethnographic research methods to the practice and the understanding of soundscape composition. Compositional strategies employed in two recent pieces by the author are considered in detail. The aim of this discussion is to link autoethnography to specific ideas about sound and listening, and to some tendencies in field recording, soundscape composition and studio production, while also providing context for the discussion of the author’s own practice and works. In drawing together this range of ideas, methods and work, sonic autoethnography is aligned with an emerging discourse around reflexive, embodied sound work.