This paper introduces strategies for the electroacoustic community to relate to, and engage with, the visual music phenomenon. It addresses technological, historical, cultural and idiomatic intersections between the two art forms. From the personal viewpoint of a trained synaesthete of acousmatic origin, the boundaries between sonic and audiovisual compositional practices appear somewhat porous. The electroacoustic language is intrinsically visual, even within its acousmatic paradigm. Visible morphologies acquire a sonorous dimension as soon as we uproot them from their cinematographic habitat and plunge them into the cauldron of a new alchemy. Multi-disciplinary lines of enquiry are essential to elucidate the workings of complex multimediatic interactions such as those at play in visual music. Yet, a holistic view of the creative and technological pathways is equally significant so that artistic truths, and myths, can be (re)discovered amidst lines of code or loops of wire connecting our computer peripherals. Thus this article is written both with the language of an analyst and, perhaps more, with the expressions and idiosyncrasies of an academic composer. A few selected examples from the contemporary repertoire are discussed to exemplify a variety of approaches to visual music composition, including extracts from the work Patah (Garro 2010).

Using Internet2 for audio performance, supported by digital video communication between players, provides the opportunity for networked electroacoustic music practitioners to connect with, bridge, amalgamate and lead diverse sound-based music traditions. In combination with intelligent/multi-agent software, this facilitates new hybrid sonic art forms. Extending prior work by the author, Mittsu no Yugo (Whalley 2010a) recently explored this direction. While Internet2 expands production/aesthetic possibilities, accommodating established aesthetics in tandem requires careful consideration. Beginning from a prior model of a decision space (Whalley 2009), the paper discusses the extended decision terrain and choices that Internet2 brings, and some of the compromises that need to be made to realise the proposition. The paper is then part conceptual map, and part artistic perspective.

A purely aesthetic approach may be problematic when artists wish to deal with the external world as part of their work. The work of R. Murray Schafer in formulating soundscape studies is described, as well as the author's extension of that work within a communicational framework. Soundscape composition is situated within a continuum of possibilities, each with its own practice of mapping or representing the world. Current technological possibilities as well as ethical issues involved in the production process are discussed, along with the author's work in creating a multi-channel imaginary soundscape. The evolving nature of the listener's relationship to acoustic space over the last century is discussed in comparison to developments in soundscape composition.

Maturation of network technologies and high-speed broadband has led to significant developments in multi-user platforms that enable synchronous networked improvisation across global distances. However sophisticated the interface, nuances of face-to-face communication such as gesture, facial expression, and body language are not available to the remote improviser. Sound artists and musicians must rely on listening and the semiotics of sound to mediate their interaction and the resulting collaboration. This paper examines two case studies of networked improvisatory performances by the inter-cultural tele-music ensemble Ethernet Orchestra.It focuses on qualities of sound (e.g. timbre, frequency, amplitude) in the group's networked improvisation, examining how they become arbiters of meaning in dialogical musical interactions without visual gestural signifiers. The evaluation is achieved through a framework of Distributed Cognition, highlighting the centrality of culture, artefact and environment in the analysis of dispersed musical perception. It contrasts salient qualities of sound in the groups’ collective improvisation, highlighting the interpretive challenges for cross-cultural musicians in a real-time ‘jam’ session. As network technologies provide unprecedented opportunities for diverse inter-cultural collaboration, it is sound as the carrier of meaning that mediates these new experiences.

The concepts of consonance and dissonance broadly understood can provide structural models for creators of visual music. The application of words such as ‘harmony’ across both music and visual arts indicates potential correspondences not just between sensory elements such as pitch and colour but also with the manipulation of tension and resolution, anticipation and stability in visual music. Concepts of harmony have a long history in proportions of space, colour and motion as well as music that artists can now exploit with new technologies. I will offer examples from my own work as well as techniques from artists such as Oskar Fischinger and John Whitney.

R. Murray Schafer's soundscape, predicated on a schizophonic engagement with sound, and Pierre Schaeffer's musique concrète, based on an acousmatic relationship, have for some time been the dominant approaches for those who wish to compose with sounds sourced from the environment. Following Brian Kane and Timothy Morton, this paper critiques the ideologies behind these systems, instead suggesting an approach that uses Deleuze and Guattari's rhizome as a generative metaphor. The Garden of Adumbrations, a multi-channel electroacoustic piece, is used to illustrate several compositional possibilities: the tracing of place through subjectivity, the machinic phylum as emergent intelligence, the interplay between Katharine Norman's self-intended and composer-intended listening, and the encouragement of accidents of listening. Also discussed are Antonin Artaud's Body without Organs, conceptions of Nature and the garden, and Luc Ferrari's Presque rien ou le lever du jour au bord de la mer. The goal is to develop an integrated and sustainable model of sonic practice that addresses the acousmatic while supporting an embedded and non-hierarchical relationship with our ecological milieu.

This paper describes the background and development of a sound installation which, over a period of time, brings together site-specific field recordings, and acoustic and amplified sounds in a complex of natural and technological sources. During the installation diverse genres of recording and territories of sound become potentially, transiently available as local birdsong, background noises and the sounds of recordings and audio technologies are realised through enculturated experiences of recordings and ambient modes of listening. The work has closely evolved out of an existing field recording practice and the version described here remains a proposal – at the time of writing – to be completed in spring 2011. The way in which the installation has contingently emerged has become a critical part of the work which – instead of being conceived of as a untransferable ‘new reality’ essentially related to a site – will be used to open and connect recorded sound to the prolific wider circulation of mediated sound and – across different milieux – to the world ‘itself’.

Starting from the premiss that the central aesthetic feature of non-representational moving images (visual music) is their structuring of reception time, the function of the accompanying music in contributing to the total (combined) temporal structure of the resulting artwork is discussed. A taxonomy of the different roles that music can play in the production and reception of visual music consisting of three basic categories is presented and examples are given:

• • ‘Music translations’: certain parameters of the accompanying music are transcoded into certain visual parameters, the accompanying music thereby provides the temporal structure of the audiovisual artwork.

• • ‘Synthetic structures’: the music and the images provide different temporal informations with enough coincidences to be synthesised into a combined audiovisual strucuture by the viewer/listener.

• • ‘Mutual disturbance’: the aforementioned process fails to be realised due to a lack of sufficient points of synchronisation. As a result the accompanying music will disrupt the recognition of the temporal structure of the images and vice versa.

This paper argues that today's sampling culture, emerging out of pioneering efforts in electroacoustic music in the 1950s carries a similar ethos of autonomy found in many significant advances in music instrumentation throughout history. By looking at the evolution of musical instruments, the author hopes to address these continuous effort towards autonomy, which, if proves legitimate should be of great concern for networked music research that deals with all forms of music praxis of varying reciprocity and group dynamics. By further looking into what sets collaboration apart from cooperation and collective creation, and elaborating on the ‘social’ of music, this paper hopes to extend the discourse on current trends of accessing, shaping and sharing music in solitude, from something often seen as unfortunate and anti-social, to something less so.

The history of sonic arts is charged with transgressive practices that seek to expose the social, aural and cultural thresholds across various listening experiences, posing new questions in terms of the dialogue between listener and place. Recent work in sonic art exposes the need for an experiential understanding of listening that foregrounds the use of new personal technologies, environmental philosophy and the subject–object relationship. This paper aims to create a vocabulary that better contextualises recent installations and performances produced within the context of everyday life, by researchers and artists at the Sonic Arts Research Centre at Queen's University Belfast.

This article examines the evolution of music notational practices from avant-garde-era experiments in ‘mobility’ to the advent of the digital ‘screen score’. It considers the varied goals of the composers who initiated these developments and the dissonance between these goals and the practical possibilities actually afforded by the paper score.

The advent of graphical computing is charted along with the consequent expansion of possibilities afforded by screening the score from a platform that also provides the potential for performer coordination, sound synthesis and transformation. The performative, interactive and formal implications of these possibilities are considered.

This paper describes the implementation of NeVIS, a local network system that establishes communication between individual performers, as well as between laptop and performers. Specifically, this is achieved by making use of vibrotactile feedback as a signalling tool within an improvisational setting. A discussion of the current developments regarding the use of networks within improvisation is presented, followed by an outline of the benefits of utilising the haptic feedback channel as a further sensory information pathway when performing digital music. We describe a case study of the system within the context of our computer-mediated improvisational duo Můstek, involving piano, percussion and live electronics. Here, a cueing system or framework is imposed over the improvisation and is transmitted directly to the skin of the performers via tiny vibrations. Additionally, performers may make use of simple vibrotactile signals to enhance traditional visual cues that are often employed within performance. A new work, Socks and Ammo, was created using NeVIS, and was presented at various international conferences and festivals. We also tested the system itself within a group of postgraduate researchers and composers. Qualitative evaluation of the musical outcomes as experienced both by the performers and by the listeners at these events is offered, as well as implications about the nature of collaborative music-making.

The pioneering contributions of Daphne Oram to visual music, notably the construction of her unique synthesiser known as the Oramics Machine during the 1960s, have yet to be fully recognised. The development of this synthesiser, in terms of both the creative objectives that inspired its design and also the functional characteristics of the resulting technology, is all the more remarkable for being the product of highly individual endeavour, working entirely without the support and resources normally provided by an institution or a commercial manufacturer. Oram's background in both music and electronics was to prove invaluable in this regard, and her appointment as the founding director of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in 1958, having previously lobbied within the organisation for such a facility for several years, provides testament to her standing in both regards. Her decision within a year of appointment to resign from this post and establish her own private studio specifically to develop Oramics is indicative of her determination and commitment to explore new horizons in the medium of electronic music, and this paper provides a perspective of her achievements, drawing on materials in the Oram archive that have hitherto not been studied.

This article investigates the essential association between location and sound, mediated and represented by the process of recording and the subsequent creation of an artwork. The basic argument this article would like to develop is that location-specific sound recording, as practised by artists and phonographers, is basically an exercise in disembodiment of sound from environment, whether it is observational or immersive in approach; if the purpose of this mediation by recording is artistically reconstructive, the location-specificity of the recorded sound is displaced by the further mediation of the creative process. By developing the argument from an experimental angle, in relation to an audio art project Landscape in Metamorphoses, this article will try to examine how the discourse of acoustic ecology becomes reconfigured in the shift from environmental sound content recorded at location to production of soundscape composition as audio artwork. Today, the application of digital media to artistic practice has become integral – in the case of audio art via creation of auditory art works (for both spatial diffusion and live interaction); this can bring about a reconfiguration of environmental aesthetics. The article will find relevance in redesigning the ecological discourse in the digital realm of ‘soundscaping’ through the practice of mediation, as composing of the sound of location, or ‘place’.

NOMADS (Network-Operational Mobile Applied Digital System) is a network client–server-based system for participant interaction in music and multimedia performance contexts. NOMADS allows large groups of participants, including the audience, to form a mobile interactive computer ensemble distributed across a network. Participants become part of a synergistic interaction with other performers, contributing to the multimedia performance. The system enhances local performance spaces, and it can integrate audiences located in multiple performance venues. Individual user input from up to thousands of simultaneous users across a network is synthesised into a single emergent sound and visual structure in an approach we call socio-synthesis. This paper recounts research leading up to NOMADS, outlines its technological architecture, and describes several implementations. Current applications include the telematic opera Auksalaq, and performances by the MICE Orchestra. The authors also consider the potential of large-scale human–computer ensembles as a paradigm for composition and performance.

This paper explores the context and technical and aesthetic considerations behind the author's generative and improvisational audiovisual work, Construction in Zhuangzi (2011), and in particular the approach of ‘audiovisualising’ the same source of data and its validation, and its possibilities as an artistic practice. First, the origins of integrated audiovisual art in the output of John Whitney are explored. Then, metaphors based on musical textures are used to describe different approaches to the audiovisual medium. Research into perception and auditory displays are next used to justify the simultaneous representation of the same data in both the audio and the video. The aesthetic potential of this practice is then corroborated using Michel Chion's theory of sound in cinema. In concluding, its possibilities for providing an appropriate form and aesthetic approach to the audiovisual material are discussed.

John Luther Adams's The Place Where You Go to Listen (2006), a permanent sound-and-light installation at the Museum of the North in Fairbanks, Alaska, resonates strongly with the geography and ecology of the composer's place of residence. The audiovisual experience is generated through a computer programme that translates real-time data streams from geophysical events into sound and colour signals. The Place functions as an artistic mirror, absorbing data from natural phenomena and reflecting it back to the listener in a deliberately allusive way. As a result, those present are invited to raise their awareness to the ‘unheard vibrations’ of the natural world.

Upon entering the installation, the listener perceives an ongoing, harmonically dense hum. Through immersion, he or she notices change in both the location from which sounds project and the properties of audio and visual signals. Drawing on information theory, this article investigates the process whereby Adams renders scientific data into an audiovisual presentation as well as the role the composer and audience play in attributing meaning to this environmentally driven work. By examining the communicative layers of the installation and exploring the perceptual tendencies of the listener, we can better understand how The Place raises environmental awareness.