‘Motive’ or ‘motif’ has long been a familiar term in writing about music, not least because many writers enjoy the word-play available when a composer's possible motivation for inventing and elaborating specific motivic materials is under discussion. The extent to which motives reach beyond melody into harmony has arguably become a more conscious concern of composers who have moved beyond traditional tonality, and some of the consequences of such concerns are considered here, in relation to recent works by two leading British composers, George Benjamin (b. 1960) and his one-time student Christian Mason (b. 1984).

This article considers the ‘representation of decay’ in selected concert works by the Australian composer Cat Hope. It draws on a mixed-method research methodology, comparing the conceptual aspects of Hope's oeuvre with analyses of studio and live recordings of Hope's work and discussing how such ideas of ‘decay’ may play out in the sonic world. Two forms of spectral analysis are employed: firstly the analysis of spectral parameters roughness, noisiness, brightness, pitch, and centroid, and secondly a visualisation of the music as a spectrogram. The data for the spectral analyses are derived from Alexander Harker's spectral descriptor tools for MaxMSP which record a value for each parameter every 25 milliseconds. At times, values are normalised within a range of 0 and 1, as representative of how listeners experience parametrical changes (i.e. dynamics, in relative terms rather than absolutes in relation to other sounds in the work). Importantly, perception of noisiness is more acute at frequencies in which the auditory critical bands are wider, below 250 Hz (roughly below middle C), precisely the upper range specified by Hope to define instruments suitable for the Australian Bass Orchestra.

Touching Sound, a symposium hosted by Sound Practice and Research at City, University of London and IKLECTIK Art Lab in 2017, aimed to explore the deeply embodied experience that is hearing and listening and add to this ever-growing field of practice and research. Composers and artists, a ceramicist, a landscape architect, and a surgeon considered the tactile experience from an open perspective, including the political, social and aesthetic. Interest in exploring touch and the tactile in relation to music and sound has grown in both practice and research. Until recently the discourse was predominantly centred on the integration of haptics with sound technology and ways in which music ‘touches’ us emotionally. Changing approaches to multi-modal experiences, often underpinned by phenomenology, and developing technological possibilities have, however, given rise to more embodied and tactile approaches to thinking about and creating music.

This article considers the ways that we might rethink our relationship to musical tools and discusses some possible implications for re-thinking these human/non-human intra-actions. I refer to my own experience as a flute player to examine the body's relationship to air and whether this can be considered to be a form of touch. In doing so I have referenced trans-cultural perspectives in order to show that specific musical practices can structure human experience in very different ways.

This article examines the techno-philosophical aspects of how we create and understand musical systems in twenty-first century computational media. Arguing that processor-based media have exploded the compositional language of new music, the article proposes a set of concepts that might help us navigate this new space of instrumental possibilities. The term ‘ergodynamics’ – and related concepts – is proposed as a useful concept when describing the phenomenological, historical and aesthetic aspects of musical instruments, as well as a lens for looking at new compositional practices that can be defined as being either ‘idiomatic’ or ‘supra-instrumental’. The article explores the difference in composing for acoustic, electronic and digital instruments, and suggests that new musical practice can be characterised by a move from composing work to inventing systems.

This article reviews a recent wave of literature on the resurgence of vinyl records, examining what it has claimed about vinyl's capacity for tangibility and the contrast to digital media, associated with intangibility. These claims are explained with reference to other literatures on touch, and it is suggested that vinyl's haptics mediates and embodies the emotionally rewarding production of a sense of self. The apparent contrast of vinyl aesthetics with classical music aesthetics is also discussed, and the presence of contemporary classical music within the vinyl resurgence is considered.

Touch is world-directed, temporally extended, exploratory contact and movement. It was by modelling his theory of perception on touch that Alva Noë was able to show (in Action in Perception, 2006) that perceptual experience acquires content through our physical interactions with the world, that the detail we perceive in the world ‘is experienced by us as out there, not as in our minds’ (p. 33). In this essay, I share some thoughts on how understanding musical experience on these terms, as touch-like, may be a useful means of looking past the work-concept to the wider field of musical possibilities beyond. I begin by briefly considering the phenomenology of touch, which serves as the basis for the argument that follows.

When tools like the stethoscope and electrocardiogram are appropriated for use beyond their intended purpose – for example in music and dance performance – how does the training of foreign users shift the framing of sound, and therefore what types of sounds from the body and apparatus come to be analysed or considered? Can we qualify the difference between a doctor and a composer listening to the heart through a stethoscope? How do the motives and methods of practitioners inform what they hear, and how they touch – to the exclusion of sensory processes beyond their frame of reference? As a choreographer and composer working with heart rate sensors, we do not seek to reveal or represent the invisible workings of the heart. Rather, in our performances and installations, the sonification and haptification of heart rhythms – along with the noise produced by the apparatus and its use – are a means to compose a context for intimate listening and touch between performers and visitors at the edges of appropriateness.

Muscle Memory is a new record I have made in collaboration with pianist Matthew Bourne (playing Memorymoog) and trumpeter Graham South. Comprising two composed sound pieces, it was released on vinyl in 2017. The pieces are structured around recordings made in the houses of each collaborator, documenting the act of listening to records. The compositions include conversation between composer and collaborators, samples of music from records heard/discussed, improvised instrumental sections, and electronically manipulated materials. Muscle Memory has since been presented to a number of audiences attending ‘living-room’ listening sessions – held in small, intimate and domestic spaces across the UK. Participative listening of this type is understood through Simon Frith and Christopher Small as an inclusive, collaborative, compositional action. The tactility (Mike D'Errico) and ‘objectness’ (David Grubbs) of records is also of importance. This text is a document of that listening experience.

For the Touch Symposium in September 2017, I presented my installation, World to escape to, salty seas to float, based on a poem by Sarah Kelly. I took as the starting point a hidden space behind the words, which through feeling, I converted into a structure combining words and sound, where the audience could create their own work through touching and interfering with items inspired by the sensations the poem gave me.

This article poses the question, what is so great about the body? Recent scholarship has emphasized the concept of an embodied cognition and reminded us of the significance of embodiment in musical performance. Yet, vital as these observations may be, they offer only a limited view of what ‘touch’ can mean. Following the semiotic notion of the index as a sign with a real connection to its object, writers and artists such as Friedrich Kittler, Ai Weiwei, Kenneth Goldsmith and Nicolas Donin have reflected on how the reproductions of the gramophone needle, the calligrapher's brush, the blogger's keyboard, and the programmer's code can trace meaningful points of contact. Examples from my own practice illustrate some of the many possible ways that digital traces can be touching.

As a pianist I spent many hours practising the connection between my touching and my listening, adjusting the pressure and weight of touching the keyboard to elicit just the right sonic texture in a note. As a composer I have spent years exploring the connection between my embodied act of notating and its potential sonic reality. Both these endeavours are acts of honing cross-modal activity. As I continue to qualify my experiences of sound and working with sound through language in instances like this – writing about my practice – I find myself constructing an increasingly complex and expanding web of linguistic gymnastics, in an attempt to explain, explore and grasp the slippery subject of listening.

This was the fourteenth year of Music We'd Like To Hear, the summer series of concerts organised by composers John Lely and Tim Parkinson. The atmosphere at these Friday evening concerts is informal and convivial – the audience is routinely invited to join the musicians down at the pub on the corner afterwards – but the underlying purpose is entirely serious about music. As always, each programme focuses on new music and significant works that have been rarely, or never, played in this country. The concerts wouldn't look out of place at Huddersfield, but the rationale here is less academic than personal.

If this review contained a single sentence on every piece that was performed – let alone every lecture, discussion or open forum – from 14 to 28 July in Darmstadt, it would easily be book-length. Like, big book – maybe not Taruskin big, but definitely Rutherford-Johnson big. I have, for the most part, written about the bits that particularly struck me and tried to make sense of them both in themselves and in the context of the courses. This was especially difficult to do this year, because there really was no singular takeaway being presented, advocated or otherwise offered, which is quite remarkable, but makes narrowing down review material even more fraught. None of the pieces discussed below get the full description and analysis that they deserve – this is just a first attempt to make sense of things that happened.

The First Night of this year's BBC Proms (BBC SO/Sakari Oramo plus youth ensembles, 13 July) offered, as it happened, an immediate comparison with one of the first Proms I can recall reviewing, back in 1973. Both concerts included Holst's The Planets, and that 1973 concert had preceded this with a beautiful composition by Elisabeth Lutyens. Forty-five years ago, she was one of four women composers whose works were featured at the Proms; without, as far as I recall, much comment on gender-related issues.

Speak Percussion, soprano Jessica Aszodi, and a crowd of 25, gave an intense performance, and world premiere, of Liza Lim's hour-long Atlas of the Sky. Lim's work was inspired by three poems: ‘The Stars’ by Eliot Weinberger, and ‘Whetting’ and ‘The Answer’ by contemporary Chinese poet Bei Dao. Imagery on stage was derived from the poetry, and the work touched on themes of community, ritual, and crowds.