Both electroacoustic music and its associated musicology are a half century old. Although the number of relevant technological developments during this time could be said to be extremely high, its music has known relatively few heroes, at least within contemporary art music, and written scholarship demonstrates a bias towards formalism and therefore much less of one towards the contextual, aesthetic, reception, etc. The previous sentence implies an imbalance worthy of addressing. This article is less a survey of what exists in the area of electroacoustic music scholarship than one looking into delineating the area and suggesting where the ‘holes in the market’ might be and how they might be filled. Are the fields of sonic art and its musicology intentionally avoiding coherence? And why do musicologists of the music of notes continue to avoid the musicology of the music of sounds? Finally, triangulation, i.e. the use of feedback and evaluation so rarely applied in electroacoustic music(ologogical) contexts, is promoted as a means to greater cohesion and understanding, avoiding what is called an ‘island mentality’ demonstrated by many individuals working in all areas of the sonic arts.

This paper presents an end-user interface that allows realtime parametric control of sound events resulting in an interactive environment, in which evolutionary computation is applied to algorithmic composition. The resulting system, Vox Populi, uses genetic algorithms to generate and evaluate a sequence of chords played as MIDI data. Harmonic, tonal and voice range fitness are used to control musical features. Based on the ordering of consonance of musical intervals, the notion of approximating a sequence of notes to its harmonically compatible note or tonal centre is used. This method employs fuzzy formalism and is posited as an optimisation approach based on factors relevant to hearing music.

A computer-assisted composition tool for investigating the application of evolutionary techniques in the composition of music is presented. The nature of such an application is examined in terms of defining the possible mechanisms that provide a means for automated creativity. These mechanisms take inspiration from processes found in Darwinian-based evolution theory, genetic algorithm theory and similar aesthetically based uses of a genetic search heuristic in the visual arts. A formal model of ‘musical evolution’ is proposed, with particular emphasis placed on the ways in which a genetic algorithm can be used to effectively manipulate a variety of compositional structures within a hierarchical and generative grammar-based model of musical composition. The result is a prototype Windows MIDI application called GeNotator that allows composers to experiment with a range of musical structures by interactively ‘evolving’ them through a familiar and comprehensive graphical user interface.