Emotion is a word not often heard in sonification, though advances in affective computing make the data type imminent. At times the relationship between emotion and sonification has been contentious due to an implied overlap with music. This paper clarifies the relationship, demonstrating how it can be mutually beneficial. After identifying contexts favourable to auditory display of emotion, and the utility of its development to research in musical emotion, the current state of the field is addressed, reiterating the necessary conditions for sound to qualify as a sonification of emotion. With this framework, strategies for display are presented that use acoustic and structural cues designed to target select auditory-cognitive mechanisms of musical emotion. Two sonifications are then described using these strategies to convey arousal and valence though differing in design methodology: one designed ecologically, the other computationally. Each model is sampled at 15-second intervals at 49 evenly distributed points on the AV space, and evaluated using a publically available tool for computational music emotion recognition. The computational design performed 65 times better in this test, but the ecological design is argued to be more useful for emotional communication. Conscious of these limitations, computational design and evaluation is supported for future development.

Notation is the traditional method for composers to specify detailed relationships between musical events. However, the conventions under which the tradition evolved – controlled relationships between two or more human performers – were intended for situations apart from those found in electroacoustic music. Many composers of electroacoustic music have adopted the tradition for mixed media works that use live performers, and new customs have appeared that address issues in coordinating performers with electroacoustic elements. The author presents generative music as one method of avoiding the fixedness of tape music: coupled with real-time notation for live performers, generative music is described as a continuation of research into expressive performance within electroacoustic music by incorporating instrumentalists rather than synthetic output. Real-time score generation is described as a final goal of a generative system, and two recent works are presented as examples of the difficulties of real-time notation.

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.

Aesthetics are gaining increasing recognition as an important topic in auditory display. This article looks to embodied cognition to provide an aesthetic framework for auditory display design. It calls for a serious rethinking of the relationship between aesthetics and meaning-making in order to tackle the mapping problem which has resulted from historically positivistic and disembodied approaches within the field. Arguments for an embodied aesthetic framework are presented. An early example is considered and suggestions for further research on the road to an embodied aesthetics are proposed. Finally a closing discussion considers the merits of this approach to solving the mapping problem and designing more intuitively meaningful auditory displays.

This article examines some of the ethical issues involved in working creatively with sound. Issues considered include: sound ownership; sound vs. vision as determinations of identity, and their relative iconicity; recorded sound; sound as physical phenomenon vs. sound as symbol; issues of copyright and trademark; community ownership; awareness, sensitivity and responsibility; composer responsibility vs. listener responsibility; the relative importance of contextualisation; and intercultural dialogue. We will conclude with a critique of the cultural and ethical shortcomings of the article itself, and a call for social, cultural and ethical engagement in creative sound work.

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.

The author examines visual design considerations in the development of real-time screen scores. Such scores are shown to lend themselves particularly well to the representation of non-linear musical processes and the articulation of non-linear musical forms. The author argues that the foregrounding of such scores, through their projection for an audience and meticulous design, draws especial attention to the manner in which such non-linear processes are represented and in turn decoded by performers. While the transparency of the decoding process is shown to vary across a wide spectrum, the central role of the notational schema in works such as these is shown to align them in many ways with a broader interface aesthetics, promoting rich fields of creative and artistic enquiry.

This paper looks at microsound – an emergent term, corresponding concept and associated genre of experimental electronica appearing in the late 1990s – which animates the idea of sound as material entity, and, as I will demonstrate, ultimately complicates and expands questions concerning disciplinary boundaries. The conceptualisation of sounds as having mass or as matter, particularly on an imagined ‘atomic’ level as is implicit in microsound, has had many historical antecedents, especially in the twentieth century. However, the comparison, representation and analogy of sound as an object of material composition is a peculiar metaphor as sound has no inherent material substance. At the meeting point of microsound, a wide spectrum of musicians and listeners across genres and subgenres has converged, along with a diverse range of technologies and approaches to those technologies. In what follows, an exploration of the inception and implications of microsound will offer one instructive path that helps elucidate the intertwined relationship between sound art and experimental electronica. Thus, this paper adds to the critical dialogue regarding these complex yet drastically under-theorised fields of creative activity by using microsound to articulate specific points of connection, commonality and divergence.

This essay elaborates a field of general aesthetic considerations relevant to the sonification of data. A set of dialectical tropes are introduced to define the possibility space for organised sonified data: data-in-itself and the listener-for-itself; cognitive support and sabotage; and the Peircean triad of rheme–dicisign–argument. Taken together, these three dialectical parameters elaborate a conceptual space in which strategies can be sought for mapping acoustic parameters to data features, data structure and sonic transformations, all with respect to listener reception. A work-in-progress is discussed in connection with this general aesthetic field, and considerations of the aesthetic space are applied to several works. Finally, the notion of data verité is explored in connection to ‘big data’ and issues related to the transformation of data into information generally.

Radio studios including Club d'Essai de la Radiodiffusion–Television Française (Paris), Studio für Elektronische Musik (Cologne), BBC Radiophonic Workshop (London) and others have historically played a key role in the development of international approaches to electroacoustic music. Nevertheless few publications explore the pre-musique-concrète sound-based experimental works of the 1920s and 1930s arising from activities undertaken at radio studios, or the dimensions, properties, implications and impact of the radio medium itself. This article explores the impact of the radio medium on creative practice and argues that radio art is not inherently a subset of sonic art, as it may first appear when nuanced from electroacoustic music practice, but can be viewed as its own art form with idiosyncratic international standpoints and transdisciplinary properties. In addition to a historical discussion, this article offers an insight into the potential for radio art practice to cross-pollinate with music practice and explore new creative territory and hybrid working modalities.

Starting from the assumption that meaning in electroacoustic music is an outcome of the listener's mental processes, it is the goal of this essay to explicate the mental processes whereby feeling and emotion contribute to meaning when listening to electroacoustic music. This essay begins with a broad consideration of feeling and emotion with an eye toward artistic experience, spanning from basic emotions to nuanced phenomenal qualities. It then introduces the concept of mental layers in support of the multi-levelled nature of meaning, especially in this case, meaning that is felt as well as comprehended. These two preliminary topics precede the introduction of the feeling blend, an extension of blend theory as presented by Fauconnier and Turner (2002). Core issues for blend theory, such as what constitutes a mental space and what triggers a blend, are reconsidered in the light of practical examples from the literature of electroacoustic music. In conclusion, the feeling blend is proposed as an essential concept to understanding artistic experience and an intrinsic aspect of being human.

Sonification has become a commonly used tool for data analysis, auditory feedback and compositional inspiration. It is often described in scientific terms as a means of uncovering previously unknown patterns in information or data through the use of the auditory sense. This goal seems to be objective, but the results and methodologies can be highly subjective. Moreover, the techniques and sources of information are strikingly similar to those used in mysticism, especially mysticisms of negation, even though the frames of reference and underlying perceptions of the world are markedly different. Both practitioners of sonification and apophatic mystics believe that certain types of information are incomprehensible through traditional analytic means and can only be understood through experience. In this way, sonification can be thought of as a source of mystical information.

In this paper, I will discuss the similarities between sonification and apophatic mysticism, or the mysticism of negation. I will argue that the practice of sonification, as a source of mystical information, is ideally suited for creative contemplation, particularly in electronic music. I will start by providing some historical background on the mysticism of negation. I will then present several ways in which sonified knowledge (sound) is often imagined, discussed and perceived akin to a mystical object. Finally, I will discuss specific ways in which sonification exemplifies apophatic mysticism and reveals mystical information. This information – whatever its nature – can be used for creative contemplation and is a potentially invaluable source of compositional and spiritual inspiration.