The advance of technology brings about modifications of style, performing techniques, music listening, and brings to us new relationships between creation, interpretation and perception. The aim of this article is to set out an approach to strategies of musical production for acoustic instruments and technological resources, describing different notions of interaction where the electroacoustic textural complexity coexists with the live processing of the instrumental source and where a goal is to work within the frame of an open and easy-to-carry-out performance structure which is friendly to the musicians, clear as a discourse and attractive to the audience.

The author's Construction in Self (2009) belongs to the interdisciplinary context of auditory display/music. Its use of data at audio rate could be described as both audification and non-standard synthesis. The possibilities of audio-rate data use and the relation between the above descriptions are explored, and then used to develop a conceptual and theoretical basis of the work.

Vickers and Hogg's term ‘indexicality’ is used to contrast audio with control rate. The conceptual implications of its use within the digital medium and the possibility for the formation of higher-order structures are discussed. Grond and Hermann's notion of ‘familiarity’ is used to illustrate the difference between audification and non-standard synthesis, and the contexts of auditory display and music respectively. Familiarity is given as being determined by Dombois and Eckel's categories of data. Kubisch's Electrical Walks, Xenakis's GENDYN and the audification of seismograms are used as examples. Bogost's concept of the alien is introduced, and its relevance to the New Aesthetic and Algorave are discussed. Sound examples from Construction in Self are used to demonstrate the varying levels of familiarity or noise possible and suggested as providing a way of bridging the divide between institutional and underground electronic music.

K-k-k-k-k-k. Boof. Chhhhhhh. Hiss, whirr, pfing: 12k's is an onomatopoeic music. The audio equivalent of concrete poetry perhaps, where the sign (there, a letter or a word; here, a click or thud or tone) is elephantised, blown out of proportion, simultaneously stripped of reference and fraught with multivalent meaning. (Is it any coincidence that 12k founder Taylor Deupree is a graphic designer? You can almost hear the flip of a serif in 12k's grainy whoosh, or the nuzzling of kiss-kerned type in the cool brush of two bleeps.) In the releases of this Brooklyn label, notes, pulses, textures bear no immediate relation to the world around them, to a language of melody or tonal narrative, but in their careful melding of pulse and grain, they sketch an abstracted narrative of the development of several phenomena: electronic music, desktop DIY, and -especially -minimalism.

Music acoustics research can provide support in terms of objective knowledge to further the rapidly developing areas of music technology and audio processing. This is illustrated by three examples taken from current projects at KTH. One concerns the improvement in quality of sound reproduction systems over the last century. A test, where expert listeners rated the year of recordings of different ages, demonstrated that significant advances were made between 1950 and 1970, while development was rather modest before and after this period. The second example investigates the secrets of timbral beauty. Acoustic analyses of recordings of an international opera tenor and a singer with an extremely unpleasant voice shed some light on the basic requirements of good vocal timbre. The unpleasant voice is found to suffer from pressed phonation, lack of a singer's formant, irregular vibrato and insufficient pitch accuracy. The third example elucidates tuning and phrasing differences between deadpan performances of MIDI files played on synthesizers and performances by musicians on real instruments. The examples suggest that future development in the areas of music technology and audio processing may gain considerably from a close interaction with music acoustics research.

In this paper I discuss Hysteria, a work for trombone and four-channel tape. Abbie Conant, an internationally reco gnised trombonist, commissioned and performed Hysteria as part of her ‘Wired Goddess’ project. I chose five lines of poetry from John Campion's Tongue Stones: ‘matter/mater/meter/muthos’, ‘bowl of regeneration/quickener of wombs’, ‘follow the mysteries of your feet’, ‘Let dark ages be crucibles’ and ‘wounds like flowers opening’. With this text I created an implex of sonic images relating the body, fertility, menses and violence. The first line is particularly important and shapes the first two-thirds of the piece. The musical material complements the text and uses periodicity to suggest the body's heartbeat and breath. The heartbeat serves as a cantus firmus, occurring every five seconds, and pedal tones form the primary material for the trombone part and connect to the idea of breath. The punctuating gunshots occurring in the first half imply violence, and the dark red lighting suggests blood. The tape and trombone intertwine in a sonic world evoking the womb and regeneration. The four-channel tape heightens the sense of immersion that connected to the piece's resonance and dream-like atmosphere. The web of these associations constitutes an artistic reflection on the sensibility and experience of the feminine in a patriarchal society.

This article examines the use of Complexity Theory as an inspiration for the creation of new musical works, and highlights problems and possible solutions associated with its application as a compositional tool. In particular it explores how the philosophy behind Complexity Theory affects notions of process-based composition, indeterminacy in music and the performer/listener/environment relationship, culminating in providing a basis for the understanding of music creation as an active process within a context. The author presents one of his own sound installations, Cross-Pollination, as an example of a composition inspired and best understood from the philosophical position as described in Complexity Theory.

Portraits polychromes are a series of books associated with multimedia documents presented on the Internet site of the GRM since 2001. In releasing this collection, our primary concern was to increase awareness of the electroacoustic repertoire and the reserves in the GRM archives. The GRM, being a pioneering centre of electroacoustics, is fortunate to possess a consistent and significant reserve dating back to the beginning of the 1950s. At present, the catalogue contains around 2,000 works, accompanied with supplementary documents: composer's biographies, reviews, photographs, documentary movies, radio broadcasts, recorded public lectures, theoretical research work, transcriptions and analyses. In addition to the heritage value of the GRM's collection, the enterprise of the Portraits polychromes, with the aid of multimedia tools, aims to advance the progress of research on analysis and the transcription of musical works.

The Imaginary Space: Developing models for an emergent Malaysian/Western electroacoustic music is a Fundamental Research Grant Scheme project funded by the Malaysian government in which intercultural investigation is centred within an electroacoustic performance environment. A unique series of music outcomes and potential models reflecting a symbiosis of Malaysian and Western art music through composition and performance are emerging for instrument(s) and electronics. This paper focuses on the first and second phases of the project investigating Western flute, Malaysian serunai and pensol nose flute with electronics. Multi-stranded investigations of connections are identified within the conception, composition, realisation and reception of these works. Performer perspectives are given through two case studies. Our purpose is to illuminate understandings of intercultural connections, to begin to re-conceptualise cultural research paradigms, and to see what we can discover about performance contexts and engagement with individuals, cultures and traditions. The research is contextualised within the philosophical theories of Gadamer, Merleau-Ponty and Ingold. Investigating the role of technology in this context impels a discussion of how these elements generate a new, multifaceted environment, the space in which intercultural and performative understandings can emerge. This article focuses on how these performance contexts become a place for research and new understandings.

Part of my listening experience has been a coming to terms with a certain set of musical forms that I call ‘flat’. Music in flat form means music that avoids obvious or dimensionally conjunct large-scale goals, points of arrival, ‘climaxes’, sectional boundaries, and the like, and therefore has proven difficult for many listeners. It has become clear to me that this music demands a different listening approach, one at odds with the way music is typically appreciated in the concert hall. This approach is one that composers of music in flat form can facilitate through today's computer-music resources. What I present here is a specific instance of such an approach: my composition Sand, a twenty-five-minute long work for computer-synthesised and processed sounds, was composed specifically to be experienced through a computer-music interface I built in the MAX/MSP environment. This paper explores what I mean by ‘flatness’, how I came to terms with it as a listener, and how this coming-to-terms spawned the idea and construction of the interface. I then discuss the interface itself, the process of interaction with the listener, and technical aspects of the software.

This article looks at the emergence of physical material in a growing number of contemporary sound-based art practices. From academic symposia to music festivals and media art exhibitions, the material presence of physical artefacts is notable in a variety of sound-based disciplines and scenarios. Considering the significance of the visual aspect of these works, this article proposes a reassessment of what audiovisual entails. I argue that our understanding of audiovisual status needs to be expanded beyond the scope of screen-based applications and move into the physical realm of objects and material. Further to this, I outline how the dominant discussions around materiality in sound-based art do not speak sufficiently to the physical materiality manifested in a growing wave within the field. Using an example of my own creative work, I will then suggest audiovisual materialism as an alternative lens through which such practices can be better examined, understood and built upon.

OB-scene is a performance centred on a live sonification of biological data gathered in real-time with a medical vaginal probe (photoplethysmograph), made by the author. The use of the photoplethysmograph, which takes inspiration from the first medical vaginal probes used for diagnostic purposes by Masters and Johnson (1966) introduces a media-archaeological aspect to this work. Data gathered through the probe is processed and transformed into sound and visuals projected in the exhibition space. OB-scene takes inspiration from Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter (2010) in which she argues that human agency has echoes in non-human nature and vice versa, shifting away from anthropocentrism towards the concept of ‘vital materiality’ that runs across bodies, both humans and unhuman. Furthermore, OB-scene is affiliated with an emerging movement of women and technology called ‘XenoFeminism’ (XF). It introduces the idea of techno-alienation and focuses on the concept of other/diverse desires, new forms of desiring, experiencing something other (Laboria Cuboniks 2015). In this specific work, this takes the form of a technofeminism incorporating the fluid, the non-human and the diverse. In this performance, the body is fused with the technology, rather than empowered or enhanced by technology itself, body and technology become a unique actant (Latour 2009) enabling the audience to experience the sensorial assemblage as a space for communal experience with political implications. OB-scene is as an immersive environmental work where the senses, affect and memory were key features of ‘assemblage thinking’ (Hamilakis 2017).

ENACTIV is a project that addresses, explores and offers solutions for converting a performer/composer's expressive sonic and kinetic patterns into continuous variables for driving sound synthesis and processing in real-time interactive composition. The investigation is inspired by the achievements in cognitive science, in particular Umberto Maturana and Francisco Varela's Santiago Theory (1980, 1987), in which the authors explain how the process of cognition arises through ‘structural coupling’ – a mutual influence among living beings, and living beings (humans in particular) and the environment, and how this process stipulates certain patterns of organisation driving the individual's behaviour.

The project investigates how a composer/performer's cognitive archetypes, which have been developed via his or her ‘structural coupling’ with the social and natural environment and expressed through voice and unwitting hand gestures, can be associated with or ‘mapped’ onto sound synthesis and processing parameters in such a way that the system will play an active role and act reciprocally, involving a certain degree of variation and unpredictability at its output. The aim of the project is to develop a creative tool which will allow professional musicians, multi-media artists and non-expert participants to engage with multi-modal improvisation in an intuitive way.

There is a rich literature on the design of formal languages for music representation on computers. Over the last thirty years, several generations of software technology have been applied to this problem, including structured software engineering, artificial intelligence, and object-oriented (O-O) software technology. This article introduces the basic notions of O-O software technology, and investigates how these might be useful for music representation. In particular, the author's Smalltalk music object kernel (Smoke) music representation language is described and examples given that illustrate the most important of Smoke's features.

This article explores recent theories of listening, perception and embodiment, including those by Mark Grimshaw and Tom Garner, Salomé Voegelin, and Eric Clarke, as well as consequences and possibilities arising from them in relation to field recording and soundscape art practice. These theories of listening propose auditory perception as an embodied process of engaging with and understanding lived environment. Such phenomenological listening is understood as a relational engagement with the world in motion, as movement and change, which grants access to the listener’s emerging presence, agency and place in the world. Such ideas on listening have developed concurrently with new approaches to making and presenting field recordings, with a focus on developing phonographic methods for capturing and presenting the recordist’s embodied auditory perspective. In the present study, ‘first-person’ field recording is defined as both method and culturally significant material whereby a single recordist carries, wears or remains present with a microphone, consciously and reflexively documenting their personal listening encounters. This article examines the practice of first-person field recording and considers its specific applications in a range of sound art and soundscape art examples, including work by Gabi Losoncy, Graham Lambkin, Christopher Delaurenti and Klaysstarr (the author). In the examination of these methods and works, first-person field recording is considered as a means of capturing the proximate auditory space of the recordist as a mediated ‘point of ear’, which may be embodied, inhabited, and listened through by a subsequent listener. The article concludes with a brief summary of the discussion before some closing thoughts on recording, listening and the field, on field recording as practice-research and on potential connections with other fields in which the production of virtual environments is a key focus.

Stochastic, unvoiced sounds are abundant in music and musical sounds. Without irregularities, the music and sounds become dull and lifeless. This paper presents work on unvoiced sounds that is believed to be useful in noise music. Several methods for obtaining a gradual change towards static white noise are presented. The random values (Dice), random events (Geiger) and random frequencies (Cymbal) noise types are shown to produce many useful sounds. Atomic noise encompasses all three noise types, while adding much more subtle variations and more life to the noise. Methods for obtaining a harmonic sound from the noise are introduced. These methods take advantage of the stochastic nature of the model, facilitating a gradual change from the stochastic sound to the noisy harmonic sound. In addition, the frozen noise repetitions are shown to produce unexpected pitch jumps with a potentially useful musical structure.