A potentially effective approach to evaluating the effectiveness of teacher preparation programmes is to explore the perspectives of recent graduates from preservice teacher preparation programmes. Thus, this study examines the perceptions of beginning music teachers in South Korea regarding how their music teacher education prepared them for actual practice. Data were collected from five participants through individual interviews and class observations. The participants identified the three learning experiences most helpful in transitioning from university to teaching practice: peer teaching, writing a master’s thesis, and interacting with peers from various backgrounds. In addition, the data revealed that the least helpful learning experiences were a disconnection between theory and practice, early fieldwork unrelated to music teaching, and methods classes that did not cover cutting-edge technology.

This paper examines how aesthetics are constructed in technology-mediated musical practice, focusing on the interplay between cultural expectations of AI-generated sounds and the technical structures determining the behaviour of AI algorithms. Through a reconstruction of events in the Surfing Hyperparameters project, we capture how the sonic aesthetics of the system were constructed by negotiating between our sonic expectations (informed by cultural narratives of ghosts in machines) and the sound produced by the system. We argue that the aesthetics of AI-generated sound are often inspired rather than directly caused by the technology itself. While existing research has identified how tools embed ‘paths of least resistance’ towards certain sonic aesthetics, our work reveals a complementary force: how aesthetic expectations rooted in cultural narratives – from science fiction’s stories of autonomous machines to sonic hauntology’s spectral presences – actively shape design decisions and sonic outcomes. Through a radically transparent approach to documenting mismatches between expectation and reality, we show that the stories practitioners tell while building and making music with technology are performative, constructing rather than merely describing aesthetic realities. Addressing these interplays between imagination, expectation and material reality constitutes an important step towards addressing the complex sociotechnical assemblages in which technology-mediated musical practices come into being.

In a well-known scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), the audience discovers that one of the main characters, Madeleine, closely resembles an imaginary character in a painting, allegedly portraying her maternal great-grandmother, Carlotta. Madeleine believes she is possessed by Carlotta, a conviction that arouses the curiosity of John – a former lawyer and police officer – hired by Madeleine’s husband to secretly follow her. Other than the portrait, Carlotta never appears physically on screen; her spectral presence is conveyed solely through composer Bernard Herrmann’s haunting musical theme. In other words, a non-diegetic element – the musical score – assumes an indirect diegetic function, as it emerges whenever Carlotta’s ‘presence’ is suggested in the scene. Herrmann’s music cannot be heard by the characters within the filmic world, but it exists in a liminal space: it translates into audible music for the audience the inevitable spectral energy felt by Madeleine and John. The painting of Carlotta functions as a gravitational centre around which multiple storylines unfold. It also offers the music an opportunity to play an active narrative role. Something similar happens in Lydia Goehr’s Red Sea, Red Square, Red Thread, which likewise takes a story about a painting as a starting point for intermedial narrative interplay. In the books under discussion here, the visual returns time and again as an anchor for the relationship between operatic fantasy and quotidian life.

Pete Townshend is a rock musician, and around him and the Who there is an important literature. However, his religious universe has been less studied, and it constitutes a fundamental part of his music and personal life. This article focuses on its three main dimensions: voluntary religion, unconscious reflections, and becoming a divinity to fans. The search for identity seems to underlie all three, in either individual or collective processes, as seen in Townshend’s songs, performance rituals, and fans’ devotion. Pete Townshend addressed God in deep and heartfelt prayers, through a medium as secular and aggressive as the Who’s rock, in the struggle to find who he was.

This article examines the virtual synthesiser as a prescriptive element in contemporary music-making, arguing that compositional tendencies emerge through concrete instrumental configurations. From a digital-organological perspective, it distinguishes analytically between synthesis method, technical implementation and interface prioritisation, and examines how their interaction foregrounds particular modes of control, listening and temporal articulation. The discussion addresses three contrasting configurations, illustrated through u-he Diva as a panel-centric subtractive instrument, two modulation-matrix wavetable instruments (Xfer Serum 2 and Vital), and Korg Modwave Native as a motion-system configuration. It focuses on how control infrastructures, DSP policies and interface organisation shape sound-design practice under comparable working conditions. Sonic fidelity is treated as an aesthetic regime enacted through design choices, encompassing process authenticity, spectral hygiene and curated digital imperfection. Combining technical analysis with two controlled practice-based vignettes, the article examines how instrument-internal control resources support the emergence of musical form under explicitly defined constraints and proposes a transferable framework for relating virtual instrument design to compositional practice within contemporary electroacoustic and studio-based music.

This article explores how a queer production of Otto Nicolai’s The Merry Wives of Windsor generates a variety of meanings about gender and sexuality, troubling the opera’s conventional cis- and heteronormative narrative and themes. Specifically, it examines the fluid relationships between the production’s materials, activities, and ideas that constantly evoke new meanings. To aid this endeavour, the author adopts Gilles Deleuze’s conception of the possible and the virtual and his understanding of sexualities. Consequently, elusive genders and sexualities emerge alongside normative and recognizable non-conforming ones. The article thus underscores how queer initiatives are pushing operatic genders and sexualities beyond their conventional forms.

Since the establishment of permanent public theatres in Brazil – known as opera houses from at least 1746 – the presence of Black and biracial artists was predominant. Enslaved individuals also participated in music, performing in orchestras and opera companies, though primarily within private contexts. During the same period, public opera houses employed singer-actors on a permanent basis. These positions were scarce and particularly significant for women, who often lacked financial independence in the Luso-Brazilian world. Many of these artists pursued parallel occupations, including tailoring, seamstressing, lacemaking and, in some cases, prostitution. Although biracial performers were required to conceal their faces with white make-up, they were nonetheless contracted for entire seasons under agreements that afforded a degree of social security, including provisions for illness. Contemporary records also document theatrical artists who succeeded in acquiring considerable wealth, enabling them to own property and, in some cases, enslaved persons. This paper examines the conditions of the first professional actors and actresses employed in eighteenth-century Brazilian opera houses, drawing on archival sources and foreign travellers’ accounts to contextualise their social, ethnic and educational backgrounds within a society profoundly shaped by slavery and racial prejudice.

Our research set out to determine how the distinctive social ethos and tactile appeal of physical modular synthesisers could be transferred into extended reality contexts. Employing a ‘netnographic’ approach, the research examined content drawn from social media platforms including YouTube, Discord and Reddit. Particular attention was given to an analysis of ‘PatchWorld’ as the most prominent commercially available virtual modular synthesis tool. Additionally, ‘OpenSoundLab’, an open-source mixed-reality modular sound laboratory that was developed in earlier research, was adapted to allow multi-user sessions in mixed reality (MR), both locally co-located or remotely. Commercial standalone headsets were handed out to three artists in order to observe how they translate their patch and performance practices into extended realities. Distributing both the headsets and software functioned as a form of ‘cultural probe’, enabling the collection of detailed user experiences and acting as a prompt for informed conversations. Through this process, the evaluation yielded evidence that some of the most valued aspects of using physical modular systems can be translated to virtual modular systems, especially since these share a similar – if not greater – potential for creative and social immersion in a spatial instrument.

Praat AudioTools is an open-source library of over 300 scripts that transforms the phonetic analysis software Praat (Boersma and Weenink) into an offline, object-centric laboratory for electroacoustic composition. While Praat is the standard tool for linguistic analysis, its potential for musical creation has remained largely untapped due to its interface design. We propose a workflow in which phonetic analysis objects – specifically PitchTiers (frequency curves), FormantGrids (resonance tracks) and TextGrids (temporal segmentation) – function as editable musical scores. Unlike real-time performance environments (e.g., Max/MSP, SuperCollider), which prioritise low-latency interaction, this toolkit emphasises ‘compositional deep time’, embedding analysis within an iterative edit–render–listen loop. Small modifications to analysis data produce structural consequences in timbre, gesture and form, enabling a research-creation practice rooted in the acousmatic tradition and spectromorphological thinking. By treating phonetic measurement as compositional material, AudioTools bridges phonetics and poetics. We contextualise this framework within the lineage of speech synthesis in electroacoustic music and demonstrate, through case studies, how it enables compositional strategies grounded in analysis as composition. The toolkit integrates neural network processing while maintaining interpretability, positioning it critically against black-box neural synthesis and arguing for transparent, parametric control in research-creation practice.