Bayu Nokturnal II is an electroacoustic soundscape composition commissioned by the Borneo Ensemble in 2024, developed as a reimagining of Seed of Life 4: Rest and Shelters, a binaural fixed-media work composed in 2021. Rooted in the ecological and cultural identity of Gua Tempurung, a limestone cave in Perak, Malaysia, the piece explores how the interplay of acoustic instruments and environmental field recordings evokes a sense of place, space and belonging. Inspired by Chris Watson’s El Tren Fantasma, the work expands from fixed media into a live, spatialised dialogue with geophonic and biophonic elements. This paper positions Bayu Nokturnal II within the evolving discourse of ecocomposition, a practice shaped by environmental awareness and sonic interactivity. It draws on Matthew Burtner’s Syntax of Snow and Hildegard Westerkamp’s Fantasie for Horns II. These works foreground the role of soundscape as an active compositional agent. Bayu Nokturnal II employs an aural-feedback score using grid-cell timing, Scientific Pitch Notation and gesture-based instructions to foster real-time responsiveness to the soundscape. This strategy replaces conventional metre with listening-driven interaction. The result is a Malaysian site-specific composition contributing to global dialogues in acoustic ecology, environmental music and performative listening.

The Italian features of Nicolas Bernier’s musical style have already been brought to light, but one remains to be addressed: his contrapuntal writing and the relationship between the basso continuo and the other parts. Nothing is known of Bernier’s stay in Rome, but musical clues suggest that he was in contact with Bernardo Pasquini and that he may have practised the latter’s partimenti. Bernier’s output betrays musical gestures inherited from these Italian pedagogical tools, testifying that the partimento tradition had a profound impact on the composer and that he played a key role in introducing its use in France.

This paper examines Summermood (1981), an electroacoustic work composed by Antonio Russek for bass flute and live electronics, situating it within the Mexican electroacoustic scene of the 1980s and in dialogue with international developments in live electronic performance. A pivotal work in both Russek’s career and flutist Marielena Arizpe’s repertoire, Summermood, stands among the earliest Mexican compositions for electronically modified acoustic instruments. It has not been able to be studied or performed due to the absence of published documentation, its dependence on the obsolete DeltaLab DL-4 digital delay unit, and its original association with Arizpe, who retired early following an accident-related injury. Drawing on archival documents, interviews, recordings and the graphic score and Russek’s notes, this paper analyses the work’s aesthetic conception, its integration of extended flute timbres with electronic processing, its graphic notation and the collaborative practices that informed its creation, arguing for its significance in the historiography of Mexican electroacoustic music. While briefly acknowledging the preservation challenges posed by obsolete technologies, the central aim of this paper is to reassemble Summermood as a case study that illuminates Mexico’s underexplored contribution to the global avant-garde of the late twentieth century.

Building on the author’s previous research into music teacher biography, this current paper examines the identity of secondary (age 11–18) classroom music teachers in England exploring, in particular, how far teachers consider themselves as musicians first or teachers first and how far this may impact upon what and how they teach their students. How we see ourselves as classroom music teachers, it is hypothesised, can impact how we view our pupils and their development as musicians, so this research seeks to investigate the truth of this. The findings, for example, suggest that music teachers who very much identify themselves as musicians first may well view their pupils more as musicians also.

During the COVID-19 lockdown, Latin American artists turned low-cost, open platforms such as Mozilla Hubs, Twitch, Jitsi, YouTube and OBS into ephemeral infrastructures for collaborative VR concerts, 3D live-coding sessions, collective streaming events and networked Algoraves. Drawing on participant observation, event documentation and informal interviews, this article examines these cases with a focus on La Fábrica VR (TOPLAP México) and related experiences in Mexico, Peru, Colombia, Argentina and Costa Rica. We argue that these practices materialise a situated, collaborative and tactically informal technological production that reconfigures agency, embodiment and listening in immersive environments.

NEURAL MATERIALS (2024) is a live AV show created by SONAMB (Vicky Clarke). The project represents a collaboration between Vicky Clarke, visual artist Sean Clarke, and industry partner Bela, a company specialising in hardware with interactive sensors for music-making. The AV show utilises a new performance system incorporating a hybrid set-up in combination with both a sound sculpture and the output of a machine learning model trained on a ‘post-industrial’ sonic dataset. The dataset renders in sound Manchester’s industrial past and present through field recordings of cotton mills, the canal network and the electromagnetic resonances of a newly gentrified city centre. This article analyses NEURAL MATERIALS as musical composition, live AV show and a demonstration of creative audio-generative AI, linking the work to scholarly and compositional legacies of Sonic Materialism and musique concrète. By combining documentation analysis and performance analysis, I interrogate how sound’s indexical properties are transformed via machine learning (ML) processes, questioning whether machines are able to evoke a sense of space or heritage. Ultimately, I contend that such audio-generative systems have the capacity to reshape our perception of industrial histories, technologies and future sonic realities, indexing sociohistorical cues that are reactivated at the point of listening.

Data-embedded instruments that couple sensing, modelling and sound production are increasingly used in electroacoustic practice, yet their ethical and cultural configurations remain under-analysed. This article develops an ethical-embodied framework for examining how particular data, sensing and mapping arrangements configure relations of care, listening and musical agency. Drawing on feminist and decolonial listening practices, disability and critical data studies and accounts of embodied instrumentality, it combines a selective genealogy of electroacoustic and globally situated practices with a mid-level comparative lens that treats its technical axes as heuristic rather than taxonomic. Case vignettes analyse works using gesture tracking, electromyography (EMG) and brain–computer interfaces (BCI), audience-sensing installations and machine-learning vocal systems, alongside the author’s own data-embedded instrument. Across these examples, the analysis shows how similar technologies can reproduce or contest institutional surveillance, extractivism and aesthetic normativity and outlines implications for the design, evaluation and teaching of data-mediated musical systems foregrounding situated listening and collective accountability.

Electronic dance music is usually produced and played at fixed tempi. However, tempo modulation occasionally appears within a recorded track or DJ performance. This article explores tempo modulation in electronic dance music production and performance, maps out how the technique operates, and explores the technique’s wider potential. Pivot mixing, where a tempo shift is created by reinterpreting a pivot loop as different note values, can be particularly effective in an electronic dance music context when the pivot is expressed as repetitive material carried across the tempo shift. Many modulations between familiar dance music tempi are possible with conventional note values and can serve as DJ tools yet are largely underutilized. Tempo modulation is not a prevalent characteristic in electronic dance music but when it does occur the technique is highly effective and temporally engaging. Pivot mixing expands the temporal vocabulary of electronic dance music from beatmatching in temporal unisons to temporal intervals.