In this article we discuss our practice-based research into effective architectures and creative workflows for creatively coding massive multidevice light and sound installation artworks. We discuss the challenges of working with networked multidevice systems and illustrate these challenges with examples of the type of content that one may wish to display on these systems. We then consider how the structuring of a creative framework can strongly influence how an artist approaches the creation of such work, eases the process of creative search and discovery and reduces the time cost and risk of solving technical problems of architecture design. We take a design perspective on how to make effective creativity support tools and also consider a holistic perspective on creative practice that attempts to satisfy creative ideals grounded in the reality of practice.

This article reflects on telematic soundwalking by initially considering the network as it is experienced in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It uses learnings and writings about our networked lives (during COVID) to generate a framework in order to understand the artist’s pre-pandemic work; more specifically, in the context of a series of telematic soundwalking performances titled A Certain Geography, of which two case studies are presented here. The network is analysed through a diverse and cross-disciplinary selection of ideas and writings on networked cultures, experimental radio, listening, philosophy, anthropology and urban design. This cluster of diverse theoretical notions become important for the creation of a type of networked listening where the authorship of I often collapses into a polyphonic intimacy of voices and soundings affected by all that is taking place in between, including the distortions created by the materiality of technologies, the different layers of ecologies at stake, the words and voices of those who sound and listen remotely and site-specifically. It proposes an incomplete reception loop where the aspiration of walking on a planned trajectory is constantly contested and destabilised. The network becomes a porous space where the I constantly morphs into a convivial-collective action.

Claude Shannon’s 1948 paper ‘A Mathematical Theory of Communication’ provided the essential foundation for the digital/information revolution that enables these very pixels to glow in meaningful patterns and permeates nearly every aspect of modern life. Information Theory, born fully grown from this paper, has been applied and mis-applied to a multitude of disciplines in the last 70-odd years, from quantum physics to psychology. Shannon himself famously decried those jumping on the ‘scientific bandwagon’ of Information Theory without sufficient mathematical rigour. Nevertheless, having a brief personal connection to Dr Shannon (and being extremely grateful for it), I will take the liberty of colouring some of my experience with computer network music with less-than-rigorous insights gained from his work.

In this article, we discuss some of our research with Local Area Networks (LAN) in the context of sound installations or musical performances. Our systems, built on top of Web technologies, enable novel possibilities of collective and collaborative interaction, in particular by simplifying public access to the artwork by presenting the work through the web browser of their smartphone/tablet. Additionally, such a technical framework can be extended with so-called nano-computers, microprocessors and sensors. The infrastructure is completely agnostic as to how many clients are attached, or how they connect, which means that if the work is available in a public space, groups of friends, or even informally organised flash mobs, may engage with the work and perform the contents of the work at any time, and if available over the Internet, at any place. More than the technical details, the specific artistic directions or the supposed autonomy of the agents of our systems, this article focuses on how such ‘networks of devices’ interleave with the ‘network of humans’ composed of the people visiting the installation or participating in the concert. Indeed, we postulate that an important point in understanding and describing such proposals is to consider the relation between these two networks, the way they co-exist and entangle themselves through perception and action. To exemplify these ideas, we present a number of case studies, sound installations and concert works, very different in scope and artistic goal, and examine how this interaction is materialised from several standpoints.

In this article we present the Networked Music Performance Library, which documents research and practice in the field of networked music performance. The library was developed in response to the skyrocketing interest in networked music due to social distancing and travel restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. In this article, we discuss the library’s working environment and briefly describe several similar earlier projects by other researchers. The main goals we set for the library were to collect materials, organise accessible and straightforward ways of navigating the collection, including knowledge from a wider context of time-based arts (theatre, dance and other time-based art forms), and create a community of users and contributors. We describe the main methods we use to find the works for the library and examine the current state of our collection, which has grown in the last year. Through an analysis of the entries’ metadata, we provide several examples of professionals’ use of the library. Current library users include performing musicians, teachers and composers. As the project is ongoing, we outline the scope of our future work as well as analyse several possible post-COVID applications for networked music, which include assisting socially isolated musicians, teaching, travel and new pandemics. We also show how this library could contribute to the development of new electroacoustic approaches.

Digital and virtual dimensions play an essential role throughout Alexander Schubert’s work, among audiovisual media, mechanisation of performative gestures, stage setting and computer tools for composing. Wiki-Piano.Net, based on the ‘wiki’ peer-production principle applied to the artistic field, is one of his first experiments with online communities’ interactivity. This article investigates the relationships between author, users and performer through the editable website. The intermedia approach extends and reflects human beings’ compositive and performative possibilities. Indeed, a wide range of internet sources communicate with the historical reference of the piano repertoire while also reflecting recent online habits. Nevertheless, the preset form anchors its expressivity to a specific communication, referring to the author’s informatics-digital attitude and a further staged representation. The man–machine dialectics is consequently expressed on different levels, also entailing acoustic-gestural and audiovisual contents. Questioning the authorship principle and generating a non-hierarchical network, Wiki-Piano.Net reflects Schubert’s aim to create a collaborative work towards which he has no control. However, the virtual environment results are strongly influenced by his settings and artistic attitude. The interaction, hence, derives not only from online users but also from the creator and performer through fundamental website mediation.

In this article we describe a Networked Music Collective for online live performance events. Four characteristics of live performance (bodies, space and time, musical culture and social process) are identified as the conceptual and technological basis of our approach. Our recent distributed comprovisation, Perripplayear, is used to illustrate these concepts and to describe the technology stack we employed. The Kaon’CPT collective uses diverse instrumentation including acoustic and electronic instruments, voice and digital musical instruments (DMIs). Its members span 12 time zones and their comprovisation is conducted via a custom distributed score.

This article presents experiences and reflections related to performing improvised, live processed electroacoustic music within a context of networked music performance. The musical interaction is performed through a new collective networked instrument, and we report how the ensemble ‘Magnify the Sound’, consisting of two of the authors of this article, meets the instrument in different networked performance situations, and how this is related to the affordance of the instrument. In our performances the network is inherent to our artistic practice, and we experience a phenomenological and somatic transformation in our roles as musicians, from individual instrumentality to shared instrumentality. The instrument invites new forms of music-making and contributes in fundamental ways to the ensemble’s musical communication and artistic expression. In the present article we outline our methods of working artistically with the networked instrument, and we point at some artistic results. We then discuss how the collective instrument has facilitated new performance and musical practice within the network.

The telematic work instance is a performance for viola and dance that digitally connects performers in Vancouver and Cape Town. The network interface enables a violist and a dancer to simultaneously play multi-user digital music-dance instruments over the internet with music and dance. The composition, design and performance interaction of instance draw from acoustic multi-user instrument paradigms and music-dance interactions in the African performing arts to explore the idiosyncrasies of the telematic performance space. The iterative design process implements soma-based research methods to inspire sonic compositional material with the body and to explore the performers’ embodied experience of sonic aesthetics during their interaction.

While a familiar term in art history, philosophy and cultural studies, ‘hyperrealism’ is rarely applied to music. This is despite Noah Creshevsky’s use of the term to describe his unique compositional process and aesthetic approach. A composer of electroacoustic music and founder of the Brooklyn College Center for Computer Music, Creshevsky has described his musical hyperrealism as a ‘language constructed from sounds that are found in our shared environment (“realism”), handled in ways that are somehow exaggerated or excessive (“hyper”)’. In this article, I summarise the ideas behind Creshevsky’s hyperreal music and compare them to philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s theorisation of the hyperreal. Numerous similarities between Creshevsky and Baudrillard’s ideas will be made evident. The first half of this article focuses on Creshevsky’s sampling of sounds as ‘simulacra’ and how the interweaving textures and melodies that Creshevsky makes out of these samples are similar to ‘simulations’. In the article’s second half, Creshevsky’s creation of disembodied ‘superperformers’ is addressed and related to Baudrillard’s transhumanism. Towards the end of the article, Creshevsky’s aesthetic more broadly and what he calls ‘hyperdrama’ are linked to Baudrillard’s ‘transaesthetics’, before a concluding note addressing Baudrillard and Creshevsky’s different dispositions towards hyperrealism.

The life and times of Peter Zinovieff (1933–2021) have been amply commented upon and there are numerous testimonies of his role on developing electronic music as well as his strong impact on musicians throughout the 1970s. However, besides his important role in developing synthesisers, sound processing and various other devices, he is now recognised as a significant pioneer in music with computers. His collaboration with Harrison Birtwistle’s opera The Mask of Orpheus has been deemed an important contribution to contemporary music in Great Britain. Finally, his late return to composition and performance shows his lifelong attachment to innovation and experimentation in music.

This in memoriam tribute for Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer focuses on his seminal work in establishing soundscape studies and the World Soundscape Project. It discusses his intellectual legacy in terms of emphasising a perceptually based approach and the importance of soundscape design, along with critical responses to his ideas.