Drawing on Umberto Eco’s epistemological metaphor of the open work, this paper explores the intersection of two open forms of notation, inherent scores and text scores, with generative AI. Building on the notion of inherent scores, in which the interface merges with the notation, we introduce embodied sketching, a notational approach that streamlines composition and performance with real-time neural audio synthesis (NAS). We then examine text scores in text-to-audio NAS, presenting Mouja+, a work combining real-time NAS with embodied sketches and AI-generated audio from Fluxus scores. Based on the experience of composing and performing Mouja+, we show how AI’s statistical processing of language introduces interpretative gaps between the human understanding of the scores and the model’s output and propose prompting strategies to streamline the use of text scores with text-to-audio generative AI. We continue by discussing how NAS adds to the open work through algorithmic processes that coalesce into an elusive and deferring sense of presence. Through Derrida’s notion of hauntology, we thus extend the open work into what we term the ‘haunted work’, an epistemological metaphor encompassing a growing corpus of works engaging with the tension between presence and absence as a source of openness.

Centring the voices of music professionals who labour offstage, including managers, live sound technicians, and festival organisers, this article critically examines gendered labour in the music industry, focussing on Belgium in the 2020s. This investigation of how intersectional gendered expectations are negotiated in musical workplaces identifies mechanisms of alienation, delegitimisation, and the sexualisation of labour that constrain professional agency. At the same time, the study finds resonances between the ways participants engage with mentorship and existing literature on such programmes, notably as professionals seek role models, navigate pay disparities, and plan improvements to training. The article theorises the function of mentorship as strategic response to structural precarity. By positioning human-scale festivals as pedagogical spaces, the study explores how underrepresented labourers navigate these environments in response to inequity. This research contributes to a qualitative understanding of how intersectional gendered workplace dynamics are experienced, contested, and reshaped in contemporary European music markets.

This paper investigates the emergence, development and creative potential of three-dimensional musical scores, examining their transformation from physical layered media to contemporary mixed reality implementations. Through analysis of key historical works and recent technological innovations, it explores how depth and spatial materiality in musical notation create new possibilities for compositional organisation, performance practice and aesthetic expression. The study examines pioneering works utilising transparent overlays and physical depth by composers such as Cage and Takemitsu, before analysing contemporary applications in augmented and virtual reality environments that enable dynamic, interactive score generation and networked performance possibilities. Drawing on phenomenological perspectives and spatial theory, the research demonstrates how three-dimensional scores challenge traditional temporal-spatial relationships in musical notation while suggesting new frameworks for understanding musical structure and interpretation. Technical affordances and limitations of current mixed reality platforms are evaluated, alongside consideration of their implications for future developments in notation and composition. The paper argues that while three-dimensional scores offer compelling new creative possibilities, their successful implementation requires both technological expertise and collaborative approaches that may reshape traditional models of compositional practice.

Polychrony is a virtual or artificial tempor[e]ality that is constructed by the fine augmentation or tempering of a natural set of latencies that articulate a complex networked acoustic. The art is to optimise the alignment of these disjunct temporalities as they merge in a new chronotopic fusion. This fooling with Mother Nature, however, does not come without consequences: due to the significant latency effects intrinsic to a planetary-scale network, a phenomenon called topo-rhythmia emerges. Toporhythms are derived simply as a feature of communication over distance; they are the multiple versions of a rhythm that occur at each node of a networked piece due to the temporal offsets caused by delay. To work with this feature more intentionally, rather than as an accident of relativity, we must tune or temper the network latency. Tempering is a general tactic for ontological negotiation, bringing observers and complex systems into some kind of coherency. The purpose of this article is to explore the tempering of musical time-space on networks and how that underlies the notational practices (and the alien compositional assumptions) built upon this novel orientation.

Notating electroacoustic music can be challenging due to the uniqueness of the instruments employed. Electronic instruments can include generative components that can manipulate sound at different time levels, in which parameter variations can correlate non-linearly to changes in the instrument’s timbre. The way compositions for electronic instruments are notated depends on their interfaces and the parameter controls available to performers, which determine the state of their sound-generating system. In this article, we propose a notation system for generative synthesis based on a projection from its parameter space to a timbre space, allowing to organise synthesiser states based on their timbral characteristics. To investigate this approach, we introduce the Meta-Benjolin, a state-based notation system for chaotic sound synthesis employing a three-dimensional, navigable timbre space and a composition timeline. The Meta-Benjolin was developed as a control structure for the Benjolin, a chaotic synthesiser. Framing chaotic synthesis as a specific instance of generative synthesis, we discuss the advantages and drawbacks of the state- and timbre-based representation we designed based on the thematic analysis of an interview study with 19 musicians, who composed a piece using the Meta-Benjolin notational interface.

This article explores phenomenological open graphic notation as an effective scoring method for instrumentalists engaging with chaotic systems in interactive electroacoustic music. Open graphic notation has long provided composers with a means of fostering interpretative freedom in musical performance. The subjective nature of open graphic scores establishes a dynamic relationship between the score and the performer that parallels the interactions between musicians and chaotic systems in interactive electroacoustic music. Chaotic systems, characterised by their non-linear and unpredictable behaviour, often necessitate improvisatory approaches rather than reliance on fixed notation. However, notation can serve as a structural framework, affording composers greater formal control while supporting performers who may be less accustomed to improvisation. How, then, might notation be used with chaotic systems in interactive electroacoustic music? Drawing on phenomenological concepts such as the lived body, embodied action and Gestalt perception, this notational approach can provide a structured yet flexible means of guiding performer–system interactions. The author presents three recent compositions as case studies, demonstrating how phenomenological open graphic notation can shape and mediate the performer’s engagement with chaotic systems in interactive electroacoustic music.

This paper re-animates debates over the unsettled relationship between jazz and popular music through an exploration of the recent ‘London jazz explosion’. It explores the framing of London jazz’s mainstreaming as counter-hegemonic in press/promotional coverage, showing how the prominence of Black musicians and Black popular musics in ‘new London jazz’ is widely interpreted as a rejoinder to perceived elitism and institutional whiteness in British and European jazz ‘establishments’. It also examines interpretations of the scene’s relative commercial success as a meaningful reversal of jazz’s institutionalisation as art music since the 1980s. I define this discourse as ‘jazz populism’, through which the very fact of the scene’s mainstream appeal is used to promote London jazz as a musical – and cultural-political – ‘alternative’. The paper provides overdue analysis of a significant development in 2020s European popular music, and deepens our understanding of the complexities of contemporary musical mainstreams.

Online music streaming has emerged as a central mode of consumption in Europe and many other parts of the world, representing a distinct break from older forms of music media such as compact discs or broadcast radio. Instead of the one-to-many models that have historically dominated music dissemination – where an individual’s listening habits could only be guessed at through aggregate sales figures or broadcast audience estimates – streaming has introduced a one-to-one model. This shift, which gradually gained momentum during the last two decades (Drott 2024, p. 1), hinges on platforms and devices that also allow unprecedented observation of how individual listeners engage with recorded music. Consequently, hundreds of millions of people are now individually tracked in near-real time, generating vast amounts of granular data.

This ethnographic study examines the transformation of Italian indie culture under platform capitalism, tracing how digital infrastructures have reconfigured the relationship between independence and mainstream commercial logic. Drawing on fieldwork with musicians, industry professionals, and audiences across Italy, it argues that the semantic and aesthetic coordinates of indie have shifted from oppositional autonomy to a stylised modality compatible with platform logics, where visibility and metric optimisation increasingly dictate artistic legitimacy through commercial imperatives and through the internalisation of platform-mediated evaluative frameworks. The Italian case, rooted in a tradition of politicised independence, reveals how local infrastructures and cultural histories mediate these global transformations. Synthesising grounded, abductive analysis with historical reconstruction, the study identifies three intertwined processes – mainstreamisation, semantic drift, and platform gravity – through which visibility metrics and sponsorship logics recalibrate artistic practice, legitimacy, and audience address, recognising that these dynamics interact with diverse cultural trajectories and do not operate as a uniform homogenising force. The emerging configurations still depend on established intermediaries, informal circuits, and human decision-making embedded in longstanding power structures, even as platform mediation intensifies the circulation and repetition of certain stylistic and organisational practices. To theorise these shifts, the article advances ‘poptimism’ as a structural condition. The analysis shows how this gravitational field is absorbed into existing professional sensibilities, where platform mentalities recur within industry judgements shaped by longstanding organisational logics.

This text explores how electronic musical instruments and electronic music ensembles can relate to composition and music notation by discussing the instruments in terms of existing practice in traditional instrumentation and in relation to symbolic electroacoustic music analysis. Starting from orchestration theory, the text considers how electronic musical instruments behave and are used, both with support from the author’s own practice and from a case study with students within the framework of a live-electronic ensemble course. The case study reflected the participants’ practice as creative composers/musicians, and how their exploratory and experimental approaches to their instruments proved important, creating challenges for notation. Traditionally, music notation relies on continuous changes of simple parameters, while performances with complex electronic instruments may have just as important information to document regarding their initial connectivity and parameter settings.

Generative soundscapes in exhibition spaces offer new possibilities for integrating artistic practice, technological innovation and perceptual experience. Contemporary tools – including stochastic algorithms, random oscillators and diverse methods of sound synthesis – enable the construction of environments that respond dynamically to external conditions. With the integration of artificial intelligence and machine learning, such systems acquire additional flexibility: they are able to register the presence and movement of visitors, evaluate changes in audience density and adjust to the acoustic properties of the space in real time. As a result, sound layers can emerge when a participant approaches, the balance of elements may shift with fluctuations in the crowd, and potential peaks in volume can be anticipated and mitigated. In this way, a fixed soundtrack is transformed into an adaptive system, where the exhibition environment functions as an active, responsive organism. Sound ceases to serve merely as a background and becomes a structural component that directly influences how the artistic work is perceived.

This article presents the first comprehensive empirical analysis of the mainstream music in Slovenia, a small and peripheral music market shaped by global trends and regional pop-cultural history. Drawing on survey data on musical preferences (2021) and radio airplays from 2017 to 2022, the study combines big data methodologies with a reflexive theoretical approach about mainstream music as a meta-genre. The findings expose the relational structure of audience taste, revealing genre clusters that reflect cultural divides between global and local, and a dual mainstream formation in the radio’s airplay: one driven by seasonal, high-rotation global hits, and another composed of canonized domestic and regional evergreens. This layered formation illustrates how institutional repetition and audience selection reproduce the status quo in contemporary cultural industries, while constraining aesthetic innovation, marginalizing younger local artists, and reinforcing generational divides within the Slovenian music landscape.

This paper examines how the design and realisation of a concert presentation entitled Drawing Sound in Space led to the concept of digital spatial notation. Seven Australian composers were commissioned to create digital scores for an electroacoustic chamber music ensemble, and scores were shared with the audience. The author argues that contemporary digital notation practices enhance live performances of new music by expanding concepts of the audiovisual to include alternative notational approaches engaging with space, creating a ‘spatial notation’. Further, Drawing Sound in Space aimed to transform musicianship and audience experience by offering a more immersive encounter with music notation as a multimodal, social practice where audience engagement and musical understanding are enhanced. A theoretical framework is provided to facilitate the analysis of each work, where semiotic expansion, temporal engagement, distributed agency and spatial reconfiguration are discussed. Through different approaches to presenting music notation in Drawing Sound in Space, the project sought to provide audiences with a novel concert experience whilst simultaneously challenging composers to design notation intended for audiences as well as performers.

The aim of this research is to examine student motivation to participate in general music classes. The research involves students aged 10–14 from a general education primary school in Croatia (N = 186). The results indicate that these students were motivated to engage in general music classes; however, a nonlinear decline in motivation was evident as students progressed through the school years. Girls were more motivated to participate in general music classes compared to boys, and students involved in additional musical activities reported higher levels of motivation. Furthermore, listening to music influenced students’ perceptions of general music lessons and was associated with their motivation.