This article contributes to theories of music and affect, highlighting listeners’ affective engagement with music as a key site for the operation of power and ideology. I take as a case study listeners’ experiences of Hindustani music in performance. In contrast with work that emphasizes the capacities of musical affect to transcend social boundaries and operate separately from (or prior to) signification, I show how the affective practices of listening in this context contribute to the reproduction of existing discourses and social formations. Drawing especially on work by Sara Ahmed, I suggest that a useful starting point for understanding how affect intersects with structures of power is to examine the affective economies and the affective orientations that shape live musical listening.

Ever since the beginning of opera, the scenografo’s role has fluctuated between invention and execution, conceptual creation and manual realisation. Initially considered an art in the old, Latin sense of the word – a craft or trade – the profession gradually gained social and aesthetic respectability, shedding its associations with the technical skills of artisans and acquiring the prestige of modern artistic expression. By the early 1800s, prominent scenografi were hailed as ‘men of genius’, although their ennoblement was never quite as complete as some renowned commentators seemed to suggest. Indeed, while we may be tempted to view the scenografo’s transformation from craftsman to artist as an uninterrupted, linear development, the debates on operatic staging that accompanied the 1930s Maggio Musicale Fiorentino challenge this inclination.

This article examines the role and status of operatic scenografi in 1930s Italy, with a particular focus on Florence and the intersection between cultural and institutional histories of the profession. What was Italian operatic set design at the time? What did this theatrical art mean, represent, produce in Tuscany’s foremost Renaissance city? Is it possible to develop a specifically urban approach to the history of set design before World War II, and where might this leave our understanding of opera production labour both during the Fascist period and today?

Benjamin Britten’s Noye’s Fludde (1958) was arguably the first community opera with an environmental message. It explored the potential extinction of animal and human life, and since then environmentalism as a social issue has begun to emerge in community operas as a distinctive trope. This article examines some more recent examples produced in the UK, from The Split Goose Feather (1979) by Christopher Brown, to Timber! (1990) by Timothy Kraemer, to Russell Hepplewhite’s Till the Summer Comes Again (2012) inspired by Glyndebourne’s wind turbine. It concludes with some reflections on the questions that arise in relation to contemporary opera, the environment and sustainability – notably how the professional operatic world can respond to concerns about the environment, and what steps are necessary to ensure the sustainability of opera for the future.

This article explores biophilic (nature-centred) instrument design and its intersection with architecture and music. While the connection between these disciplines is often discussed figuratively, they are less often combined in practice. The Biophilic Instrument Pavilion (BIP), a site-responsive sound and light installation, serves as a model for such a collaboration using biophilic design as a unifying principle. This multidisciplinary project demonstrates spatialisation in ecological, sonic, visual and social contexts, offering insights into environmental instrument practices and collaborative creative processes.

OTTOsonics is an open hardware platform developed by a team of engineers and composers, designed to prioritise affordability and flexibility, addressing the needs of a broader community interested in spatial audio. At its core, the platform features a custom-designed, high-quality 4-inch speaker with a 3D-printed cabinet, and an affordable multichannel power amplifier. It also offers a comprehensive set of mounting accessories and a knowledge base for producing and presenting spatial audio using open-source software. Over the past three years, OTTOsonics has been adopted by multiple cultural initiatives, universities, and audio enthusiasts, enabling the production of new spatial audio works across genres such as electroacoustic, experimental, and pop music. This article outlines the key decisions made throughout the project and presents the technical and artistic outcomes after three years of operation. We discuss the key features of an open platform for spatial audio and how our designs address these needs, as well as future directions for further projects and initiatives.

The French poet Henri Chopin (1922–2008) was one of a generation of experimental young artists around 1955 who recognised new possibilities for innovation in the realm of expanded sonic assemblage that is at once viscerally embodied and highly mediated. The catalyst: the newfound availability and affordability of the portable reel-to-reel tape recorder. This article examines the relation between Chopin’s recorded ‘audiopoems’, which were built up over time by means of distortion, layering and looping, and the artist’s unusual approach to performing live with these recorded compositions. Through strategies of aural assemblage, including physically tampering with the tape, randomly cutting and splicing the reels, and accentuating feedback, Chopin circulated the voice in new ways, both intimate and collective. This article considers how he experimented with live performance as mediation par excellence, harmoniously juxtaposing live improvisation with the preceding mediation of sound recording technology, to create a ‘double extension’ that generated feedback as well as improvisatory spaces of encounter. This article examines several projects – both realised and speculative – as well as archival accounts of performances in the 1960s and 1970s to reflect on Chopin’s unwavering commitment to the very human scale, individual and collective, of mediated expression.

Today’s field of spatialisation in acousmatic music is very heterogeneous. Composers tend to develop their own technologies and techniques for spatialisation, and often the differences in how multichannel systems are addressed may influence both the musical appreciation and the future reproducibility of a piece. Moreover, the analytical and musicological perspectives of spatialisation are both fragmented and underdeveloped, with a lack of a shared framework for their study. This article focuses on these problems and tries to give a coherent and consistent view of spatialisation practice, from both technological and musicological perspectives. It will also act as a bedrock for the development of the musicological side of spatialisation, an aspect too often overlooked. ‘Spatial reduced listening’ and ‘spatial relativism’ will be introduced as analytical perspectives to shine a light on the composed spatial traits of sound, and not only on its spectromorphological and technological features.

This article explores the intersection of electroacoustic music in multichannel immersive audio environments and trauma-informed therapy practices through gestural mediation in artistic works. Drawing on Jean-François Augoyard’s definition of anamnesis, the article examines how spatial audio can evoke memories and mirror the psychological landscapes associated with trauma. The research is centred around the composition Crumble, which uses spatial sound to articulate fragmented mental states of individuals processing traumatic experiences. Through an analysis of the spatial placement of sound, gestural technologies and embodied interaction, the article demonstrates how these elements converge to create immersive environments that facilitate an understanding of trauma and memory. The findings highlight the role of embodied cognition in music performance, showing how Crumble’s integration of body, space and sound fosters audience connection through immersive spatialisation and gestural mediation. By integrating these practices, this study offers new insights into the therapeutic potential of immersive electroacoustic music as a medium for expressing complex emotional states. Combining embodied sound, gestural control and spatial audio promotes the exploration of space and memory, encourages personal agency and supports reintegration of body and mind, aligning with trauma-informed practices. It suggests avenues for future exploration in the intersection of music, psychology and immersive technologies.

While the relationship between space and openness has been explored in electroacoustic music since the 1960s, and contemporary composers have shown increasing interest in contingency, recent advancements in ambisonics, sound diffusion, and VR have granted composers greater control over the spatial image presented to the listener. This article revisits the discussion of space and openness through the lens of the author’s artistic practice and compositional experience, framed by new materialism, object-oriented philosophy and relational space theory. Through case studies from the author’s work, it examines spatialisation strategies that emphasise openness and the agency of sound materials. These strategies include sound source localisation, networks of family resemblances and parametric spatialisation, aiming to create an open sound experience that maintains identity while allowing agency for the sound material, the listener and the composer. In light of current global crises, partly driven by total control and exploitation, this article advocates for rethinking compositional practices to foster open sound experiences that reflect dynamic interactions between composer, material and listener.

“It is commonly accepted in Europe, and widely known here, that the originators of minimalism are Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Phil Glass,” begins a column published in the Village Voice in July 1982, by the composer and music critic Tom Johnson.1 Johnson was a crucial presence in the New York experimental music scene—and perhaps the central voice in identifying the nascent aesthetic of musical minimalism—but was dissatisfied with how narrowly this movement of drone- and repetition-based musics had come to be defined. Though Johnson expressed sympathy with the tendency to “reduce music history to a rather short list of Great Men,” he also interrogated the notion of list-making, and the problematic framework of “original minimalist,” providing 27 names that might better elucidate the category—knowing also that, as he put it, “more accurate lists get too long and bulky.”