This article examines the creation of an Urban Archive as an English Garden, a work that uses GPU-accelerated low-resolution wavefield synthesis (WFS) to combine field recordings, live performance and generative audio in real time. Owing to computational overhead, WFS is often pre-rendered, leading to a less dynamic and more static scope for the embodied and intersubjective nature of human sensory understanding, a tendency that can also be found in traditional soundscape composition. We argue that engagement with real-time WFS offers a new approach to soundscape composition, wherein musical-system design may have multiple agencies, or that of virtual environment, co-creator, archive and hybrid instrument. Through a post-phenomenological lens, an analysis of the work’s creation through different domains reveals how these technologies afford novel practices to engage with our sonic environments. Additionally, the article unpacks how this same process, grounded in site-responsive design offers new approaches to composition, performance and artistic collaboration across these practices.

The notion of sound space emerges as a multifaceted exploration within the music, artistic and architectural realms, delving into its evolution from a musical object to a transdisciplinary aesthetic event. Rooted in the interplay of sound and space, the term defies strict definition, reflecting a dynamic amalgamation of interpretations throughout its historical practices and conceptualisations. This article engages with different perspectives on the subject of sound space, bringing together a group of architects, sound engineers, artists and researchers – all of them dedicated to sound – to discuss the sensitive experience of listening to space, within material, and/or dematerialised realities. The methodology was based on a series of interviews, confronting their different points of view, therefore building a compelling retrospective around the subject of study. In this exploration, sound space emerges as a complex entity that transcends traditional boundaries, offering a unique lens through which practitioners redefine architecture, challenge perceptions and engage in a dynamic interplay between sound, space and the listener’s experience. The resulting territory is depicted as a rhizomatic system with diverse temporalities coexisting and influencing the understanding of sound space within phenomenal and material perspectives. It portrays a dynamic and evolving system, celebrating diversity and interaction in a transdisciplinary field.

The widespread deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning tools has created a shift in knowledge culture. The marginalisation of slower, more traditional modes of engagement for quantifiable data easily parsed by mathematical algorithms has resulted in prioritising proprietary or opaque datasets (knowledge) explicitly constructed with measurable parameters. Well-documented concerns persist regarding the narrow range of human data used by algorithmic tools, data that arguably encapsulates the many failures of human society. The inevitable result of the use and priority of this data, alongside very particular notions of value and what is valuable, is a replication of many of the foibles of our history as a species.

Cultural practice in general necessitates the communication of what drives our hopes and underlies our experiences. In algorithmic times we can see that this kind of communication supports some of the many critiques of AI and machine learning already extant in activist circles. Through investigating some of the theoretical backgrounds of this resistance, this article uses the first iteration of HEXORCISMOS’S SEMILLA AI project and the resulting album release as one of the many possible ways in which we might use machine learning and AI tools alongside very deliberate and uplifting models of community and community building.

The documentation of sound art installation has received scant research attention. This ARTICLE investigates the sensory experience of spatial audio recordings of two sound art installations: Écosystème(s) by Estelle Schorpp and Générateur Stochastique by Jean-Pierre Gauthier. Interactive listening sessions WERE CONDUCTED with participants from different fields of expertise: sound artists, sound engineers, new media and sound art curators, and new media and sound art conservators. Listening sessions were followed by semi-structured interviews questioning the selection of significant positions in time and space in the recordings. The analysis revealed a broad range of listening strategies which expand the literature on documentation frameworks. This research shows the potential for methodologically including the sensory experience in the documentation of sound art installations and discusses the use of spatial recording as a tool for the specification of documentation in a multi-expertise context.

The increasing number of applications for spatial audio technologies has led to a growing interest in the subject from academic institutions and a more capillary diffusion of techniques and practices to non-institutional contexts, especially independent sound artists. However, the lack of a methodology for learning these technologies motivated our team to develop the Open Ambisonics Toolkit (OAT). Our goal is to promote the diffusion of spatial audio technologies by combining three pedagogical components: a DIY approach to hardware, a selection of open-source software, and a step-by-step introduction to Ambisonics theory through practical applications. The present article focuses on the development of a flexible toolkit and is based in our own practical experience as sound artists and teachers. We describe the process of designing hardware and selecting software components, and report results from objective measurements and listening tests conducted to evaluate different loudspeakers and spatial configurations. To conclude, we discuss future perspectives on the development of tutorials for learning spatial audio with OAT, which we are continually testing in workshop settings with students and independent sound artists.

This article surveys spatial music and sonic art influenced by the traditional Japanese concept of ma – translated as space, interval, or pause – against the cultural backdrop of Shintoism and Zen Buddhism. Works by Jōji Yuasa, Midori Takada, Michael Fowler, Akiko Hatakeyama, Kaija Saariaho and Jim Franklin created in conscious engagement with ma are analysed with respect to diverse manifestations of ma in Japanese arts and social sciences, including theatre, poetry, painting, rock garden, shakuhachi and psychotherapy. Jean-Baptiste Barrière provided the Max patch for Saariaho’s Only the Sound Remains (2015) for this survey. I propose a framework of six interlinking dimensions of ma – temporal, physical, musical, semantic, therapeutic and spiritual – for discussing creative approaches to ma, alongside their resonance with Hisamatsu Shin’ichi’s seven interconnected characteristics of Zen art: Asymmetry, Simplicity, Austere Sublimity/Lofty Dryness, Naturalness, Subtle Profundity/Deep Reserve, Freedom from Attachment and Tranquility. The aim is first to examine how each composer uses different techniques, technologies and systems to engage with specific dimensions of ma. Second, to illuminate possible futures of exploring these dimensions in spatial music and sonic art through three methods: Inspiration, Transmediation and Expansion.

We have all made poor decisions, and some such questionable decisions are artistic in nature. When looking back on one’s early work, it is easy to have tinges of embarrassment that are counterbalanced by nostalgia. John Baldessari made this dynamic tangible in 1970 through his Cremation Project, an undertaking in which he burned all of his paintings and baked some of the resulting ashes into cookies. Viewing some of these cookies/ex-paintings several years ago, I felt that Baldessari’s approach to his previous work, simultaneously embracing, annihilating and remaking, was a fitting way to let go of one’s artistic past. My user-driven installation Confessional provides the opportunity for composers to briefly take pleasure in and (symbolically) destroy one of their dubious creations. This process is accomplished with a computer running Max and a user-provided recording that is processed live. The audio processing unfolds in stages that mirror the phases of animal decomposition. Through this series of transformations, the user’s piece transitions from its original state to nearly imperceptible bits of noise. In this article, I examine Confessional, focusing on the work’s conceptual background, related issues such as memory and hierarchy, and the structure of the Max patch that is used for processing.

This article investigates the innovative pedagogical approaches and cultural integration of electroacoustic music in Papua, Indonesia, through the work of composer and educator Markus Rumbino. Born in 1989 in Jayapura, Papua, Rumbino is the first professional electroacoustic composer from eastern Indonesia. After returning to Jayapura in 2013 to join the Institute of Arts and Culture (ISBI) Tanah Papua, he faced unique challenges in a region where electroacoustic music is largely unfamiliar and often misunderstood. The study explores how Rumbino bridges Western music education with Indigenous Papuan sound environments to foster cultural identity and confidence among his students – primarily Indigenous from East Indonesia, including natives from the Papuan Highlands with limited formal musical training. Through detailed interviews and analysis, the article examines his innovative use of soundscape composition, listening exercises and soundwalk methodologies as pedagogical tools. By engaging students in critical listening and exploration of their local soundscapes, Rumbino reconnects them with their cultural heritage while introducing contemporary artistic expressions. Situating his methods within the broader context of soundscape literature and inclusive educational practices in electroacoustic music, this article highlights the transformative potential of integrating local soundscapes into music education. This contributes to discussions on culturally responsive teaching methods and the role of environmental sounds in fostering musical creativity.

This article introduces the Voice Leaf, an outsider among Baschet’s numerous sound sculptures because of the use of the performative voice. Conceived in 1965 by French pioneers Bernard and François Baschet, the sculpture for voice consists of a stainless steel sheet folded as a leaf using origami technique. This article explores how voice and sculpture interplay acoustically by evaluating the voice’s agency and the sculpture’s aural dynamic gain. In this mutualist relationship, multiple senses are mobilised: aural, visual and haptic. The voice harboured in the sculptural leaf gains materiality and a resonance altered by the sculpture’s intrinsic properties. The article draws from conversations at the Structures Sonores Baschet Association open day with chairperson Pierre Cuffini and former workshop and acoustics research director Frédéric Fradet, as well as an interview with multidisciplinary artist and long-term collaborator of Bernard Baschet, Sophie Chénet.

This article is a discussion with supporting commentary, exploring the complex interplay and role of experimentation in various British Black music genres. We consider these as rich sources of cultural production, what we term the ‘Black Box’. As part of this Black Box discussion, we consider the researcher’s role in studying cultural production at global, national, regional and community levels. We critique the tendency of Western markets to both commodify and homogenise as well as raise concerns about perpetuating forms of neo-colonialism, especially with the increased importance of Africa, particularly styles such as afrobeats. Our discussion highlights the paradox of late corporate capitalism’s short-term focus, and we consider whether there is potential for a technological infrastructure to create genuine cultural and economic growth, that also challenges Eurocentric and Anglo-American dominance of the music industry. Within this flux, the importance of experimentation and the emergence of micro-genres facilitated by the internet advances a global dispersal of new sounds. However, this diversity is shadowed by the continued relevance of major label structures and the role of streaming platforms in controlling and mediating artist–fan relationships.

This article explores an under-discussed and unclaimed conceptualisation of futurity that can be located within historical sound practices and sonic thoughts of the Indian subcontinent. In the 1950s and 1960s, this alternative sonic worldview influenced Western music and its sound pallet without credit. The intervention of this futurism in the Western model of music, sounding and listening was revolutionary, proliferating an alternate aesthesis of time, space and subjectivities in sound practices – with an emergent environmentality, manifesting arguably in the birth of ambient music and sounding arts and remodelling of sensing the world from a relational perspective. Yet, this sonic worldview, knowledge system and a radical sense of non-linear futurity were not recognised then. But the importance of the futurity can be appreciated today on the verge of multiple planetary crises. It is in this time and day that a futurist vision may provide a new sense of surviving for a posterity and generate a possibility of emancipation from the fear and loathing for a dystopian tomorrow, which is construed from a Western perspective entrenched in its rationality. How can we hear possible futures from perspectives of South Asia that have been marginalised in sonic epistemologies by an absence of voices, which could offer new grounds?

This article considers modular composition as an approach to engendering structural plasticity in musical works. Structural plasticity, in this case, is defined as the ability for the components of a musical work (e.g., events, ideas, sequences, textures, timbres) to vary in how and when they are presented. In this research, modular composition is the process for creating a collection of individual musical ideas (e.g., sequences, patterns, phrases) termed ‘modules’, and designing a dynamic system for their assembly into cohesive structures. This approach results in musical works that exist in a state of constant structural flux, allowing for real-time alteration while progressing beyond similar existing approaches observed in video game music and interactive music apps, from which this research takes inspiration. Approaches involving compositionally focused intelligent music systems are also observed, highlighting how modular composition bridges traditional compositional practices and the design of interactive music systems. Two of the authors’ own works are discussed with regard to how modular composition can be implemented in varying creative ways. The outcome of this work illuminates the creative possibilities of integrating traditional compositional practices with new digital approaches to arrive at a more structurally plastic and alterable form of music.