This article investigates the approaches and attributes of publicly situated sound installations which have achieved the status of permanency, and have attracted ongoing local, and even international, visitors. The article draws on international fieldwork in 2015 that documented several enduring sound installations in the United States, UK and Europe. Through an inductive process including listening exercises, sound recordings, observations and interviews, the analysis identifies three approaches to creating sound installations and ten attributes of operative sound installations. It is argued that by encouraging public listening, the discussed sound installations successfully establish a sensory connection between people and their environments. By extension, it is argued that this emergent sense of place is commensurate with the installations’ capacity to augment a pre-existing ‘spirit of place’. These findings culminate in a sonic placemaking tool for situating sound art installations in urban spaces. It is suggested that urban planners and designers can apply the presented sonic placemaking tool to augment a site’s spirit of place, thereby affecting new experiences in everyday urban life.

When soundscape composers, documentarians and artists work with soundscapes, they are expressing relationships with the world, through their treatment of place, sounds and audience. A number of questions could be asked about these expressions about places, the ethics of these expressions, and the ways in which these ethics are informed by underlying ideologies of sound, of sound production and of sound ecology. One key question concerns a common distinction between ‘high-fidelity’ and ‘low-fidelity’. Are there some – possibly unintended or unexamined – ethical implications embedded in the dichotomisation of ‘hi-fi’ vs ‘lo-fi’ in soundscape theory? Is this really an essential or unavoidable concept and expression, or are there alternatives? One such possible alternative is found in the concept of the ecotone – a marginal zone, a transitional area or time where species from adjacent ecosystems interact. This leads us to an idea of ‘ecotonality’ that might offer a more flexible, less polarised, alternative to the hi-fi/lo-fi dichotomy. Finally, we will interrogate three themes around ideas of soundscape ’authenticity’: authenticity of place, authenticity of production and authenticity of connection.

This article proposes a narrative theory thought in terms that are specific to sound practice. It addresses two different fields – Acousmatic Music and Foley Art – as a possibility of understanding sound narration and conceptualising it around the idea of fiction. To this end, it begins from the concepts of sound-motif, sound-prop and sound-actors, in order to propose a dramaturgic practice specific to sound terms.

The theory of sound dramaturgy acquires a practical outline by making use of multichannel constellations as a composition strategy, with specific loudspeaker arrangements. The theory advocates loudspeakers as the mediators of the experience and the stage as part of the audience’s assembly. This translates into a practice of staging sound fiction, which focuses on formulating a conjecture based on formal and factual structures, allowing for a direct relationship between the listener and the listening, between the sounds and their fictional location.

In Western countries and in Japan, experimental practices of music have developed into larger communities that share a common musical aesthetic and language, and are generally associated with genres such as noise music, free improvisation, or experimental music. However in South East Asia, and particularly in Indonesia, these categories are of little use for finding artists making unique music. Instead, distinctly individualistic styles and a form of musical experimentalism is found at the edge of more popular genres such as punk, metal, or as a result of incorporating traditional and indigenous musical influences. Ensembles Asia is project that aims to explore these forms of musical experimentations that slip through conventional categorisations of music. The project also tries to cultivate a new network of musicians through playing together in a large improvising ensemble.

This article provides four viewpoints on the narratives of space, allowing us to think about possible relations between sites and sounds and reflecting on how places might tell stories, or how practitioners embed themselves in a place in order to shape cultural, social and/or political narratives through the use of sound. I propose four viewpoints that investigate the relationship between sites and sounds, where narratives are shaped and made through the exploration of specific sonic activities. These are: sonic narrative of space, sonic activism, sonic preservation and sonic participatory action.

I examine each of these ideas, initially focusing in more detail on the first viewpoint, which provides the context for discussing and analysing a recent site-specific music improvisation project entitled ‘Museum City’, a work that aligns most closely with my proposal for a ‘sonic narrative of space’, while also bearing aspects of each of the other proposed viewpoints.

The work ‘Museum City’ by Pedro Rebelo, Franziska Schroeder, Ricardo Jacinto and André Cepeda specifically enables me to reflect on how derelict and/or transitional spaces might be re-examined through the use of sound, particularly by means of live music improvisation. The spaces examined as part of ‘Museum City’ constitute either deserted sites or sites about to undergo changes in their architectural layout, their use and sonic make-up. The practice in ‘Museum City’ was born out of a performative engagement with(in) those sites, but specifically out of an intimate listening relationship by three improvisers situated within those spaces.

The theoretical grounding for this article is situated within a wider context of practising and cognising musical spatiality, as proposed by Georgina Born (2013), particularly her proposition for three distinct lineages that provide an understanding of space in/and music. Born’s third lineage, which links more closely with practices of sound art and challenges a Euclidean orientation of pitch and timbre space, makes way for a heightened consideration of listening and ‘the place’ of sound. This lineage is particularly crucial for my discussion, since it positions music in relation to social experiences and the everyday, which the work ‘Museum City’ endeavoured to embrace.

Composers have been drawn to the world’s southernmost continent, Antarctica, for creative inspiration since the so-called ‘Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration’ in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, it has only been since the final few years of the twentieth century that professional composers have had opportunities to travel to the far south as part of arts residency programmes to experience its environment – and its unique soundscapes – first-hand. Most composers who have visited Antarctica to date have utilised sound recording technologies to document their journeys sonically and have subsequently created compositions that feature their soundscape recordings. Typically, such compositions include biological sounds, such as vocalisations of penguins and seals (both on the ice and underwater); non-biological or ‘geophysical’ ambient sounds that emanate from the natural landscape, such as those created by wind, blizzards, and ice cracking and calving; and/or anthropogenic (human) sounds recorded within the Antarctic environment.

This article examines a series of recent compositions by four established composers who have visited Antarctica and used their experiences and field recordings to inform their creative work: Douglas Quin, Jay Needham, Lawrence English and Philip Samartzis. The primary aim of this research is to investigate what these composers’ Antarctica-related works reveal about their individual encounters with and perceptions of the frozen continent, as well as to consider the role of such compositions in conveying messages related to climate change to listeners around the globe – the vast majority of whom are unlikely to ever see or hear the place in person.

Drawing on Deleuze’s work about cinema (the ‘movement-image’ and the ‘time-image’), this article explores formal and aesthetic resonances with sound-based music, distinguishing between aesthetics of energy, articulation and montage, and aesthetics of contemplation, space and virtual relations. A second perspective is given, focusing on how listening behaviours may impose a ‘movement-image’ or a ‘time-image’ lens through which we could experience and remember a work’s form. This is exemplified with a short analysis of the first section of Chat Noir (1998–2000) by Elizabeth Anderson.

This article is an attempt to demonstrate the relation between appreciation of morphology and structure in form on the one hand, with higher symbolic structures – crucial for meaning formation routines – on the other, and to evaluate their significance in transmedial narratives, primarily in the case of media-based artworks. The use of catastrophe theoretical models to classify forms, their structure and dynamics is proposed, and the question of how these models can give us insight into the meaning that is carried through transmedial narratives (referential or abstract) is examined. Finally, the value of these insights for the composition and practice-based analysis of multimedia art forms is demonstrated.