This issue of Organised Sound is devoted to a conference, ‘Music without Walls? Music without Instruments’, which took place at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK in June of this year. It was hosted by the university's Music, Technology and Innovation Research Group. As one can easily discover, given the conference's title, the goal of this meeting was to investigate vision and plans for the future. The three-day event included papers, musical events, installations, demonstrations and a plenary. All artists whose pieces were selected for the conference concerts were requested to present vision papers to accompany their performance.

As part of the evolution of our editorial structures for Volume 6 we were delighted to be able to establish a post on our Editorial Board for a representative of the International Computer Music Association (ICMA). We hoped to support the ICMA in a fruitful way, and I am now delighted once again to be able to announce that Organised Sound will be devoting its third issue annually to an ICMA theme and the work of the association's members (from Volume 7 Number 3). We hope that this will provide an additional dissemination vehicle for the organisation, allow its conference papers to be developed and expanded, provide an opportunity to publish work based upon the ICMA special interest groups and the association's affiliates. A representative of the ICMA will become a Guest Editor alongside the Organised Sound team of Editors and international referees for the third issue in each year.

The collection of papers in this issue of Organised Sound results from a call for material focused on the theme of music technology in Australasia (New Zealand, Australia and neighbouring Islands of the South Pacific) and South East Asia (Brunei, Burma, Indonesia, Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam).

This conference talk is about change. It does not pretend to be an academic paper as such; it was offered at the ‘Music without Walls? Music without Instruments?’ conference as a provocative ‘performance’. The following pages investigate twenty-six developments associated with music that one might discover in the not-too-distant future.

Music technology work in Southeast Asia faces challenges unique to this region. Economic, religious and cultural factors hinder its progress. Despite these factors, pockets of development have occurred, most notably in Singapore and Malaysia. Academic programmes have been introduced; strides have been made in research and development; and commercially viable music technology products have been invented and marketed. Various centres in the region are active in music technology-related work: the Music Department at Universiti Putra Malaysia, the Electronic Music Lab at the National University of Singapore, and Creative Resource at the International Business Park in Singapore. The First International Music Technology Conference in Southeast Asia held in Kuala Lumpur recently received lukewarm response in terms of turnout and contributions. People from this region have produced a relatively small number of music technology-related publications. Music technology work in Southeast Asia can thus be said to be in its infancy with small but significant steps being taken to expand; however, for the region to become a major contributor on the international level, the various hindrances identified will need to be addressed and overcome.

K-k-k-k-k-k. Boof. Chhhhhhh. Hiss, whirr, pfing: 12k's is an onomatopoeic music. The audio equivalent of concrete poetry perhaps, where the sign (there, a letter or a word; here, a click or thud or tone) is elephantised, blown out of proportion, simultaneously stripped of reference and fraught with multivalent meaning. (Is it any coincidence that 12k founder Taylor Deupree is a graphic designer? You can almost hear the flip of a serif in 12k's grainy whoosh, or the nuzzling of kiss-kerned type in the cool brush of two bleeps.) In the releases of this Brooklyn label, notes, pulses, textures bear no immediate relation to the world around them, to a language of melody or tonal narrative, but in their careful melding of pulse and grain, they sketch an abstracted narrative of the development of several phenomena: electronic music, desktop DIY, and -especially -minimalism.

Dealing predominantly with ‘art music’ aspects of electroacoustic music practice, this paper looks at cultural, aesthetic, environmental and technical influences on current and emerging practices from the upper half of the North Island of New Zealand. It also discusses the influences of Asian and Pacific cultures on the idiom locally. Rather than dwell on the similarities with current international styles, the focus is largely on some of the differences.

In this article Thaemlitz posits that the current state of digital audio production's borders are not determined by battles between academia and the marketplace, subsidy and enterprise, nor high-brow and low-brow. However, such binarisms continue to frame our efforts in ways which fuel rhetoric of transformation and revolution, while diffusing our material ability to impact a cultural mainstream. Rather than attempting to resolve such divisiveness and hypocrisy in our behaviour, Thaemlitz proposes an increased awareness of the cultural processes which facilitate our simultaneous participation in such seemingly irreconcilable arenas. In other words, celebrating diversity sometimes means throwing a party for a friend you are not particularly fond of.

It is recommended that we collaborate with science and industry in the search for technological innovation in media-related fields, in order to help design a future environment that will benefit a healthy musical culture. Since those of us who are already immersed in the technology are accustomed to its less attractive attributes as well as its potentials, we can consult with colleagues about essential characteristics of the old-fashioned world which we and they do not want to lose. With our collective imaginations, it should be possible to preserve many of these aspects by transforming them, with sensitivity, to fit new contexts. A few diverse examples are given of features that might be considered both attractive and endangered. Suggestions ranging from the practical to the whimsical illustrate some possibilities for injecting the essence of these experiences into a more technological world, thereby enriching it.

The author has written articles and papers on the possibilities of differentiated spaces in the composition of electroacoustic music (Emmerson 1994, 1998). He extends this into a more practical discussion on the spaces used for the presentation of electroacoustic music (acousmatic music and ‘live electronic’ music), sound installations and other sonic art. The move into more informal ‘club’ environments is not without controversy. The ‘sampling’ approach to the very act of listening and ‘consuming’ sonic art has challenged traditional concert hall presentation. This paper brings various possibilities into plans (at once conceptual but also intended to have practical application) for a multi-space ‘Sound House’: a centre for the performance of the sonic arts. This centre is socially embedded within interpersonal human interaction and is not to be found in the current performance possibilities of the Internet – though it may be connected to others of its kind through this means.

This article traces the evolution of electroacoustic music in Wellington and the South Island of New Zealand. Electroacoustic music has a well-established tradition in New Zealand, dating back to Douglas Lilburn's pioneering work in the early 1960s. The Victoria University of Wellington Electronic Music Studios (VUW/EMS) that Lilburn established in 1966 became a focal point for electronic music activities in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This article examines current approaches to electroacoustic music composition, and discusses the facilities at Victoria University, the University of Canterbury and the University of Otago.

The Spring sunshine makes the blind a perfect glowing square, clearly much later than the twenty-three minute duration of the live recording I set in motion, as I lay on my friend's bed alone, drunk on vodka and tonic and giddy with big city kicks after the very . . . Manhattan evening I was taken on. It was dark, I was too full of it to take the subway back to Brooklyn, I remember the cab ride over the bridge, no dog to greet me as I unlocked the heavy steel door. I was laughing at Alan Vega complaining about not being allowed to smoke, there was booing . . . ‘Frankie Teardrop’ had been glitching over Brussels for hours.

When we ask what noise is, we would do well to remember that no single definition can function timelessly - this may well be the case with many terms, but one of the arguments of this essay is that noise is that which always fails to come into definition. Generally speaking, noise is taken to be a problem: unwanted sound, unorganised sound, excessively loud sound. Metaphorically, when we hear of noise being generated, we understand it to be something extraneous. Historically, though, noise has just as often signalled music, or pleasing sound, as its opposite. In the twentieth century, the notion of a clear line between elements suitable for compositional use (i.e. notes, created on instruments) and the world of noises was broken down. Russolo's ‘noisy machines’, Varèse and Satie's use of ostensibly non-musical machines to generate sounds, musique concrète, Cage's rethinking of sound, noise, music, silence . . .

Using his own experience of forty-three professional engagements over a period of a year, most of which involved performances on a laptop computer, the author examines the nature of the ‘musical scenes’ into which involvement with computer music has led him. The author contends that the social nature of ‘computer music’ is changing not only because of changes in the technology, but also because of a number of social factors, some of which are examined in this article.

This paper describes an exploration of utilising the World Wide Web for interactive music. The origin of this investigation was the intermedia work Telemusic #1, by Randall Packer, which combined live performers with live public participation via the Web. During the event, visitors to the site navigated through a virtual interface, and while manipulating elements, projected their actions in the form of triggered sounds into the physical space. Simultaneously, the live audio performance was streamed back out to the Internet participants. Thus, anyone could take part in the collective realisation of the work and hear the musical results in real time. The underlying technology is, to our knowledge, the first standards-based implementation linking the Web with Cycling '74 MAX. Using only ECMAScript/JavaScript, Java, and the OTUDP external from UC Berkeley CNMAT, virtually any conceivable interaction with a Web page can send data to a MAX patch for processing. The code can also be readily adapted to work with Pd, jMAX and other network-enabled applications.

Milch is taken from Nicolai's first solo exhibition in the UK (shown in 2001) and is a special commission for Milch's industrial space. The minimal installation is a repetition of the same groups of objects four times over. There is a CD and amplifier connected to four 9″ speaker cones by thick coils of black cable. A shallow 2 × 1 m tray containing water is placed on top of the speaker cones and sonic frequencies constantly stretch and bend the water's molecules. The surface shifts from absolute flatness through spirographic swirls to geometric grids, effects which are recorded in a series of photographs hung around the gallery.

On 31 December 1999 the La Trobe University Music Department closed its doors. From the outset, La Trobe Music saw itself as providing an alternative tertiary music education to the predominant paradigms of the time by fostering creativity through composition, technology, improvisation and other types of alternative performance practices. The philosophy of teaching electroacoustic music at La Trobe was to encourage students to find their own compositional voice rather than preach a particular style of electroacoustic music. The Department's research areas were in improvisation and technology, signal processing, gestural control devices, computer-assisted composition, analysis of electroacoustic music, realtime DSP, live electronics and installations. La Trobe's excellence in electroacoustic music was recognised by its inclusion in a survey of the world's top twenty-three computer music institutions by the Japanese journal Intercommunication 6. La Trobe staff and postgraduate students contributed papers and compositions to international and national computer music conferences and La Trobe was very much a part of the international community for over twenty-five years. The challenge now is for other Victorian institutions to meet the needs of today's students and to provide the deep research foundation in electroacoustic music that informs teaching and generates new music directions in the community.

This paper will deal with the changes that have come about in the description of musical knowledge and with the ensuing needs in this field in the era of decentralisation. Throughout almost all the twentieth century, musical practices continued to be expressed by a system of cultural mediations that proved to be a practical impediment to the emergence of non-conventional cultures. Electronic music in particular and its corrosive tendencies, though spread and supported by remarkable composers, has ended up being devoured by academic immune systems. Now that the diffusion of Net computing has induced people to intervene in musical material, a poetics based on interference is spreading. By gaining ground on grammatical and self-referenced poetics, this trend has gradually become a palpable fact and music perceives itself as both individual writing and a production of social meaning. At present, a globe-net-transfer of sound material passes through different contexts and spaces, and seems to be adapting itself to different social speeds. Through the Net we can, on the one hand, replace, manipulate and recontextualise musical parameters until a different significance emerges; at the same time, randomising and hybridising musical objects can partially change our perception of the same musical events. On the other hand, music online databases, audio browsers and musical queries may open the way to overthrowing, reorganising and personalising music description. This could occur at different levels and to different degrees of complexity, both as a social event and as an active, user-based combination of musical structures.

This paper addresses the issues concerning the impact of music on cyberspace globalisation. It points out that Internet access is limited to only one per cent of the wealthiest human population. It also looks into the future of cyberspace music and predicts that most of the cyberspace activities are going to be unleashing one of many of humanity's predispositions – the predisposition to steal. Cyberspace represents a perfect medium for concealing a person's identity and for the masking of any of the responsibility that is expected from socially acceptable human behaviour. With these aspects in mind, the paper concentrates on the Internet's distribution of pirated software and the trading of MP3 files. The paper also focuses on commercial music whose economic impact on the development of music technology allows ‘academic musicians’ to appropriate most of the tools that otherwise would not have been developed for ‘academic’ use.

This article attempts to place the dynamic of popular electronic music, evident since the late 1970s and extending to the current situation, at the forefront of developing both a strategy of critique and a medium for critical reflection. The genres covered include electronic music in and around the time of punk rock, subsequent moves to the forcing ground of pop music with the era of synth-pop, the dynamic upheavals created through the surging form of techno, up to the prevalent genres of micro-sound and electronica. The essence of both the body of critique formulated by the music, and the critical reflection of such critique (as developed in works when a genre of music is said to have ‘passed’) is not pinned to a rigid model of assessment. Instead, the strength of popular music's ability to strategise and conduct a critique is considered in the self-same music's ability to subvert the definition and ‘metric spaces’ of critique as accumulated through previous genres.