This paper examines the use of soundscape elements and mimetic sound-identities in the music of Denis Smalley. It attempts to reconcile these elements with the acousmatic tradition from which his music emerges, illustrating that it does not represent a contradiction, but rather a refined aesthetic where spectromorphological and soundscape concerns relate in symbiosis. A close look at key works, including Empty Vessels (1997), Valley Flow (1992) and Pentes (1974), reveals how these elements manifest themselves in his work, and how the spectromorphological and soundscape aspects of these pieces work together toward shared goals.

This four-part exposition revisits Denis Smalley's concept of sound surrogacy from a critical constructive approach. In the first part, Smalley's article from 1997 serves as a point of origin for a close investigation of his concept. We examine the precise definitions and demarcations in his concepts and we attempt to systematise the model. In the second part of the investigation we attempt to solve some of the problems in Smalley's model by suggesting a new surrogacy model originating in Smalley's idea, but with a more formal structure and obvious demarcations. Having presented this new surrogacy model, with references to Georges Bataille's theories on base materialism as well as anthropological studies, we attempt to create a new order of surrogacy that in its object relation is positioned beneath Smalley's first-order surrogacy (as the remote surrogacy order is placed above the third-order surrogacy) – an impossible/paradoxical category that will be termed transgressive sound surrogacy. In the fourth part we demonstrate this new surrogacy order in a series of examples found in art and culture.

A method is presented for the type synthesis of a class of parallel mechanisms having one-dimensional (1D) rotation based on the theory of Generalized Function sets (GF sets for short), which contain two classes. The type synthesis of parallel mechanisms having the first class GF sets and 1D rotation is investigated. The Law of one-dimensional rotation is given, which lays the theoretical foundation for the intersection operations of GF sets. Then the kinematic limbs with specific characteristics are designed according to the 2D and 3D axis movement theorems. Finally, several synthesized parallel mechanisms have been sketched to show the effectiveness of the proposed methodology.

By drawing concept diagrams of Smalley's seminal writings, I have attempted to show how Smalley's ideas on acousmatic music have evolved from manipulating sound objects to creating ‘space-forms’. The work Wind Chimes is analysed with respect to spectromorphology and sound shapes, and it is compared to the work Base Metals, which is analysed with respect to spectral space. A connection is then made between the evolution in writing and the evolution in composition.

The proper transmission of wave variables rather than power variables in teleoperation with time delays ensures system passivity – rendering the entire system stable, but the introduction of wave variables leads to distortion between the velocities/positions of the master and slave, and the performance deteriorates significantly with the increase of time delays. This paper presents a new compensating scheme implemented at the slave side to remove or cancel partially the distortion. The system passivity can still be maintained by tuning a properly designed low-pass filter. Compared with previous work, the main contribution of this work exists in two points: first, it is the actual velocity/trajectory of the slave rather than the reference velocity/trajectory of the slave that tracks the master one, so the quality of tracking is better and converges faster; second, the proposed compensator does not require any additional signal from the master side, minimizing the amount of data transmitted over the channel, which is very important from the practical point of view. The simulation and experiment results show that the velocity (or trajectory) tracking is significantly improved under the condition of stability, and the force presented to the user is close to the environment one, meaning a high degree of system transparency is achieved.

Inspired by Denis Smalley's theoretical ideas on spectromorphology and Albert Bregman's (1990) auditory scene analysis, I began an investigation into the formation and segregation of timescales1 in electroacoustic music. This research inevitably led me to an exploration of the factors that shape our perception of time passing and estimation of durations, where spectromorphological issues intermingle with extra-musical associations, autobiographical experiences, emotional responses, and the surrounding environment at the time of listening. Ultimately, time perception affects the structural balance of a composition. This paper, which is part of my ongoing research, examines how the perception of time is affected by the semantic meaning and the spectromorphological characteristics of sound events.

The concepts introduced by Smalley in the context of space-form (2007) have firmly put acousmatic music on a discourse of spatial exploration, holding much potential for the developing of aesthetics in new directions. This article approaches space from the low level of musical structure, with a multi-dimensional attitude to space-form, exploring spatial texture, a concept introduced by Smalley to describe the temporal formations of space in spectromorphology (1997). Spatial articulation is investigated in the context of granular-oriented textures, proposing a micro-spatial, perceptual morphology – the texton – as an aesthetic approach to acousmatic music. This follows Albert Bregman's speculation regarding equivalents to visual perception in texture, where the theory of textons was first developed by the neuroscientist Béla Julesz.

The article discusses acousmatic textons, in terms of intrinsic properties, the way they propagate in time, and how they organise in distributions to form spatial textures. The emergent macroscopic qualities of textonal formations are also reflected upon in the introduction of a group of textural states, where source-bonded spaces and abstract musical thinking coalesce.

Denis Smalley devoted himself to the elaboration of a method based on the analysis of spectral transformations by connoting sonorous motions and adopting metaphors borrowed from non-musical contexts. While considering Smalley's earlier theorising within the context of past and contemporary research, this paper focuses on the use of non-musical models in spectromorphological design in order to show how sonorous qualities, imaginative factors and extra-musical meanings concurred in defining new cognitive itineraries and in extending the terminology adopted, thereby establishing the basis of a new compositional approach.

ENACTIV is a project that addresses, explores and offers solutions for converting a performer/composer's expressive sonic and kinetic patterns into continuous variables for driving sound synthesis and processing in real-time interactive composition. The investigation is inspired by the achievements in cognitive science, in particular Umberto Maturana and Francisco Varela's Santiago Theory (1980, 1987), in which the authors explain how the process of cognition arises through ‘structural coupling’ – a mutual influence among living beings, and living beings (humans in particular) and the environment, and how this process stipulates certain patterns of organisation driving the individual's behaviour.

The project investigates how a composer/performer's cognitive archetypes, which have been developed via his or her ‘structural coupling’ with the social and natural environment and expressed through voice and unwitting hand gestures, can be associated with or ‘mapped’ onto sound synthesis and processing parameters in such a way that the system will play an active role and act reciprocally, involving a certain degree of variation and unpredictability at its output. The aim of the project is to develop a creative tool which will allow professional musicians, multi-media artists and non-expert participants to engage with multi-modal improvisation in an intuitive way.

Since its conception, Denis Smalley's spectromorphology has equipped listeners and practitioners of electroacoustic music with appropriate and relevant vocabulary to describe the sound-shapes, sensations and evocations associated with experiences of acousmatic sound. This liberation has facilitated and permitted much-needed discussion about sound events, structures and other significant sonic detail. More than 20 years on, it is safe to assume that within the electroacoustic music community there is an agreed and collective understanding of spectromorphological vocabulary and its descriptive application. Spectromorphology's influence has been far reaching, inciting approaches to electroacoustic music analysis (Thoresen 2007), notation (Patton 2007), composition and education through its flexible functionality and accessible pool of vocabulary.

Suppose you are given a number of points in a plane and want to have those lines that each contain a large number of the given points. The Hough transform is a computerized procedure for that task. It was invented by Paul Hough (1962), originally to find the trajectories of subatomic particles in a bubble chamber, and it has even been patented. Nowadays, adaptations of the Hough transform are used, among others, for identification of transformed instances of a predefined figure, instead of just a line, in a digital picture. There are plenty of explanations on the Internet (use search key “Hough transform” and “generalized Hough transform”), some with nice applets to demonstrate the working (add search key “applet” or “demo”). Recently, Hart (2009) has looked back at the invention. We show how the original procedure could have been derived.

Although Kant (1998) envisaged a prominent role for logic in the argumentative structure of his Critique of Pure Reason, logicians and philosophers have generally judged Kant’s logic negatively. What Kant called ‘general’ or ‘formal’ logic has been dismissed as a fairly arbitrary subsystem of first-order logic, and what he called ‘transcendental logic’ is considered to be not a logic at all: no syntax, no semantics, no definition of validity. Against this, we argue that Kant’s ‘transcendental logic’ is a logic in the strict formal sense, albeit with a semantics and a definition of validity that are vastly more complex than that of first-order logic. The main technical application of the formalism developed here is a formal proof that Kant’s Table of Judgements in Section 9 of the Critique of Pure Reason, is indeed, as Kant claimed, complete for the kind of semantics he had in mind. This result implies that Kant’s ‘general’ logic is after all a distinguished subsystem of first-order logic, namely what is known as geometric logic.

Nieuwenhuis et al. (2006. Solving SAT and SAT modulo theories: From an abstract Davis-Putnam-Logemann-Loveland procedure to DPLL(T). Journal of the ACM 53(6), 937977 showed how to describe enhancements of the Davis–Putnam–Logemann–Loveland algorithm using transition systems, instead of pseudocode. We design a similar framework for several algorithms that generate answer sets for logic programs: smodels, smodelscc, asp-sat with Learning (cmodels), and a newly designed and implemented algorithm sup. This approach to describe answer set solvers makes it easier to prove their correctness, to compare them, and to design new systems.

Dubhashi, Jonasson and Ranjan Dubhashi, Jonasson and Ranjan (2007) study the negative dependence properties of Srinivasan's sampling processes (SSPs), random processes which sample sets of a fixed size with prescribed marginals. In particular they prove that linear SSPs have conditional negative association, by using the Feder–Mihail theorem and a coupling argument. We consider a broader class of SSPs that we call tournament SSPs (TSSPs). These have a tree-like structure and we prove that they have conditional negative association. Our approach is completely different from that of Dubhashi, Jonasson and Ranjan. We give an abstract characterization of TSSPs, and use this to deduce that certain conditioned TSSPs are themselves TSSPs. We show that TSSPs have negative association, and hence conditional negative association. We also give an example of an SSP that does not have negative association.