Despite the gradual proliferation of scholarly work around sound, and in particular its role in experimental music, there is little explicitly sonic philosophy that attempts to provide a ground for such research. Decades after the work of Pierre Schaeffer to theorise the objet sonore – sound object – and John Cage’s (1973: 10) call to ‘let sounds be themselves’, there remain few ontological and epistemological frameworks to support investigations into aesthetic, ethical and political questions related to experimental music practice and the place of sound in it. This makes writing about sound difficult and contributes to a lack of clarity or specificity in the use of terms such as ‘sound’, ‘noise’ and ‘silence’. In this article I seek to address this, connecting the work of transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau, experimental music composer and thinker Cage and philosopher Michel Serres with my own experience to develop an account of sound in experimental music that approaches it as multiplicity. This allows sound to be heard as physical, perceptual and conceptual and brings into question the reproducibility of sound, emphasising the place of sound as part of its environment.

The years since the turn of the millennium have seen an increasing number of sound artists engaging with contemporary environmental issues such as biodiversity loss, sustainability and climate change through their work, forming a growing movement of environmentally concerned sound art; however, their work has yet to achieve the recognition enjoyed by comparable environmentalist practices in almost every other art form. This article argues that this increasingly significant area of sound arts practice should be recognised as a distinct field in its own right, and proposes that it be termed ‘ecological sound art’, reflecting its equivalent in the visual arts. After establishing its current absence from both ecocritical and sound arts scholarship, it proceeds to outline some of the core approaches which characterise works of ecological sound art, as the first step towards its establishment as a coherent field of practice. The final section draws from key works of contemporary ecological theory, examining the fundamental accord that exists between the new modes of thought they propose and the ways in which we experience and relate to sound art, demonstrating that ecological sound art represents not only a significant new field of sound arts practice, but also a powerful ecological art form.

French musique concrète artist Pierre Schaeffer pioneered new ways of listening to and studying sound. His study and manipulation of recorded sounds to create music changed the way contemporary musicians, from a multitude of disciplines, approach making music. Additionally, Schaeffer’s treatise on acousmatic listening to sonorous objects has deeply influenced contemporary sound studies. In this article, I elucidate how musique concrète has informed my practice-led research project, Looking Awry – from which I will discuss two case studies. I outline how acousmatic listening to field recordings from everyday environments informed the development of performance strategies that guide improvised musical performance; a malleable practice that can be applied to a variety of performance settings.

This article traces the development of the EMS VCS3 synthesiser from the inception of its precursor, the Don Banks Music Box, through its prototype to its commercial release. The nature of the design team and their technical and aesthetic choices are also discussed. The VCS3 is significant in that it was the first commercial European synthesiser and the team that created it – Tristram Cary, David Cockerell and Peter Zinovieff – were key figures in the development of British electronic music. This detailed study of the genesis of the VCS3 and some of the factors that influenced its design touches on many technical and historiographical strands that may be examined in more depth by future scholars.

Relations between histories, sources and preservation problematics are explored by evaluating how Dutch electroacoustic musical life is discussed in international histories of electronic music. Some Dutch cases consisting of different generations of interdisciplinary, live, performance-based electroacoustic work are discussed: the work of Dick Raaijmakers, Michel Waisvisz and Huba de Graaff. These cases point to some important aspects of preservation and the formation of histories. An emphasis in electronic music histories on technology and on technological innovation comes at the expense of information on the musical and artistic aspects. For greater interest in musical aspects, it is crucial to have more access to the music itself. The works and practices of Dick Raaijmakers, Michel Waisvisz and Huba de Graaff seem to resist documentation, ontologically and practically but, on the other hand, there is a desire for its documentation and dissemination. For their work, preservation means: making something new while being faithful to the past. It is therefore that I propose to regard preservation as performance. This music only remains alive when we are not solely interested in linear innovation, but in a profound relation with the past, in reworking the past.

This article aims to investigate the ways in which context-based sonic art is capable of furthering a knowledge and understanding of place based on the initial perceptual encounter. How might this perceptual encounter operate in terms of a sound work’s affective dimension? To explore these issues I draw upon James J. Gibson’s ecological theory of perception and Gernot Böhme’s concept of an ‘aesthetic of atmospheres’.

Within the ecological model of perception, an individual can be regarded as a ‘perceptual system’: a mobile organism that seeks information from a coherent environment. I relate this concept to notions of the spatial address of environmental sound work in order to explore (a) how the human perceptual apparatus relates to the sonic environment in its mediated form and (b) how this impacts on individuals’ ability to experience such work as complex sonic ‘environments’. Can the ecological theory of perception aid the understanding of how the listener engages with context-based work? In proposing answers to this question, this article advances a coherent analytical framework that may lead us to a more systematic grasp of the ways in which individuals engage aesthetically with sonic space and environment. I illustrate this methodology through an examination of some of the recorded work of sound artist Chris Watson.

No art form so rigorously organises time as music. Whereas all art in some sense exists in time, music could be said to be of time. This article, however, questions implicit assumptions about the fundamental nature of time to music. In contrast, an alternative approach to the discourse of composition and analysis is proposed in which space rather than time is privileged. Russolo, Stockhausen, Cage and Agostino Di Scipio are cited as historical precedents where the status of time in music is questioned but a more detailed consideration is given to Ryoji Ikeda, a contemporary sound-art practitioner who, it is argued, represents a turn towards the privileging of space in contemporary music practice. This article argues that an approach to composition that implicitly accepts the primacy of time tends to privilege sounds that are more easily described symbolically, such as notated pitched sounds or materials with clear spectromorphological design. In contrast, an approach that places greater concern with the work in space facilitates the greater use of materials that could be considered ‘noise’, in the sense of both a broadband spectrum and signal disruption.

In this article I outline the idea of an empirical/experiential reconnection to the natural non-human world through the practice of deep listening. I believe that the aesthetic experience is central to a more ecological positioning of the human being on earth and that aesthetic experience should involve a ‘rewilding of the ear’. To discuss this concept, I build an argument from Edgard Varèse’s music as ‘organised sound’ and approach it from a perceptual point of view. This leads to the discussion of other concepts, such as David Dunn’s ‘grief of incommunicability’ (Dunn 1997) and Jean-François Augoyard and Henry Torgue’s ‘sharawadgi effect’ (Bick 2008). Further to this I discuss parallels between Truax’s continuum (Speech–Music–Soundscape) and Peirce’s semiotic system. Taking points from these theories, we can discuss the possibility of the re-tuning of our ears to the wider sound palette of the world. I consider George Monbiot’s concepts of ‘rewilding’ and ‘rewilding of the human life’ (Monbiot 2014), in order to create a parallel to our relationship with the soundscape.

This article examines the early reception of Pierre Schaeffer’s theoretical work in Quebec through the teaching of Marcelle Deschênes, principal author of the first electroacoustic theory and ear training curricula at both Université Laval and Université de Montréal. An account of Deschênes’s educational career is provided, along with remarks on the contents of her early courses in Morpho-typology and her listening workshops for children, using newly excavated primary material from her private archives. While existing scholarship presumes that Schaefferian thinking arrived in Quebec with the ‘orthodox’ acousmatic approach of Francis Dhomont, this article asserts that a pluralist and multidisciplinary interpretation of Schaeffer’s work can be discerned which pre-dated Dhomont’s teaching and has had an equally lasting impact overall. A methodological argument is also made for including education and other forms of ‘reproductive labour’ in the history of electroacoustic music.

The Alternative Histories of Electronic Music conference in 2016 reflected a rise in research that explores new and alternative directions in electronic music historiography. Accordingly, attention has been focused on practitioners previously either ignored or thought to be marginal; a significant number of these figures are women. This fact has caught the attention of print and online media and the independent recording industry and, as a result, historical narratives of female electronic musicians have become part of the modern music media discourse. While this has many positive aspects, some media representations of the female electronic musician raise concerns for feminist scholars of electronic music history. Following the work of Tara Rodgers, Sally MacArthur and others, I consider some new media representations of electronic music’s female ‘pioneers’, situate them in relation to both feminist musicology and media studies, and propose readings from digital humanities that might be used to examine and critique them. This article expands on a talk given at AHEM and was first conceived as a presentation for the Fawcett Society event Sound Synthesis and the Female Musician, in 2014.

This article presents a multimodal exploratory study aimed at searching for evidence that can guide us in the adoption and/or improvement of appropriate theoretical–methodological approaches for studying the role of the spatiality/spatialisation of sound and the cognitive/affective empathic processes involved in the acousmatic experience. For this purpose, controlled listening sessions were conducted in which fragments of different loudspeaker music were presented. The subjects reported their emotional experience and the degree of familiarity they assigned to each sound fragment. Specific questions for the acousmatic fragments inquire into the potential relationships between the sound stimulus and the emotion declared by the subjects. From these experiences, qualitative reports were obtained through a semi-structured interview, and electrodermal activity (EDA) logs were recorded in parallel for an intended group. Based on these results, it is argued that spatiality might be linked to a complex cognitive–affective response from the listeners and emerges as a distinctive element of the meaning that the listeners ascribe to their acousmatic musical experience.

How can historians of electronic music address the factory labour of the global underclass of women building electronics used in sound technologies? How can we speak to the repetitive work of women who are racially and sexually stereotyped as having ‘nimble fingers’, being ‘detail oriented’ and ‘obedient’? Although women workers in electronics assembly are already de facto entangled in contemporary sound production, scholars have yet to enfold their lives and labour into histories of electronic music. I situate electronic sound technologies since the 1960s in the contexts of the global division of labour and the intimate disciplining of women’s bodies, and investigate the discursive fallout of transnational subcontracting in the electronics industry. I argue that rethinking the category ‘women in electronic music’ is a necessary step for sound studies and musicology, and I call for a new disciplinary understanding of electronic sound and audio as fundamentally neo-colonial.

Instrumentally oriented and individualistic approaches dominate the current perspectives on musical interaction and technologically oriented composition. A view that focuses on the broad aspects of creativity support is proposed as a viable theoretical and methodological alternative: ubiquitous music practice. This article summarises several findings in ubiquitous music research, pointing to new theoretical frameworks that tackle the volatile and distributed creativity factors involved in musical activities that take place outside of traditional venues, involving the audience as an active creative partner. A new definition of ubiquitous music is proposed encompassing four components related to the human and the material resources, the emergent properties of musical activities and the design strategies involved in supporting distributed decision making. We highlight the application of embedded-embodied cognition in creative practice, arguing for the adoption of an ecologically grounded framework as an alternative to the mainstream anthropocentric and disembodied acoustic-instrumental paradigms. We discuss the relevance of the new materialist concepts of ecologies and meshworks within artistic creative practice, highlighting the implications of the emergent creativity support methods for context-based composition.

Through a musical examination of The Hands (Movement 1) (1986), this article reveals musical developments of Michel Waisvisz’s early performance practice with The Hands. Waisvisz’s digital musical instrument, The Hands, helped shape the body as a recognisable agent of musical structure; this article details how the instrument controls relate to musical gesture and reveals the physical efforts of the composer through spectral analyses of the sound recording and an investigation of a 1987 performance video. The rich context of The Hands – the instrument controls, Waisvisz’s decades-long dedication to the instrument’s potential and, more centrally, the exploration of human effort in performance – have made this pioneering live-performance system for electronic music stand for more than just a musical instrument. Many authors cite Michel Waisvisz’s Hands technology but few provide musical analyses of Waisvisz’s music. The musical analysis of The Hands (Movement 1) (1986) highlights the art practice of a seminal composer–performer through one of his most important digital musical instruments and signals how the body became an instrument for playing digital electronic music.

This article provides a close study of the University of Iowa Electronic Music Studios. The point of such a detailed account of one studio is to shed light on activity within the field of electronic music that previously did not occupy a place in the literature. Few of the studios listed in Hugh Davies’s International Electronic Music Catalog have received detailed attention. Until a wider range of close studies that pay attention to the particularities of individual cases becomes available, it will be difficult to do the comparative work necessary to gain an appropriately textured overall account of the development of electronic music in the post-war period. As these detailed studies, based largely on first-hand documentation, increase the resolution of electronic music’s history, they may highlight significant but previously unnoticed, or at least under-appreciated, patterns in the development of electronic music and act as an effective barometer of changing trends.

This article introduces the concept of ‘situated composition’, examining it in relation to developments in mobile sound production technologies and practices. Situated composition draws attention to the specific circumstances in which sound production and compositional activity take place. With mobile devices and apps offering heightened mobility and ease-of-use, ways of working with sound increasingly may be undertaken in a wide range of contexts outside of controlled environments specifically designed for sound work such as studios. Situated composition emphasises the interconnections between the situation in which composition unfolds and the process of composition, approaching composition as inherently distributed and collaborative in multiple ways. This article begins by considering how to situate mobile audio production apps, then moves on to elaborate the concept of situated composition and investigate specific practices. Drawing primarily on interviews carried out with fourteen composers, sound artists, musicians and producers who use mobile devices and apps in their sound work, as well as on podcasts, forums and my own work as a sound artist, I identify seven approaches to using mobile interfaces, focusing particularly on practitioners’ relationships with the surroundings where compositional activity unfolds.

This article concerns context-based live electronic music, specifically performances which occur in response to a particular location or space. I outline a set of practices which can be more accurately described as site-responsive, rather than site-specific. I develop a methodological framework for site-responsive live electronic music in three stages. First, I discuss the ambiguity of the term site-specific by drawing on its origins within the visual arts and providing examples of how it has been used within sound art. I then suggest that site-responsive performance might be a more helpful way of describing this type of activity. I argue that it affords an opportunity for music to mediate the social, drawing on Small’s idea of music as sets of third-order relationships, and Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics. Third, I suggest that with the current renewed trend for performances occurring outside of cultural institutions, it is important to be mindful of the identity of a particular site, and those who have a cultural connection to it. I make reference to a series of works within my own creative practice which have explored these ideas.

Reflecting upon Max Neuhaus’s and Alvin Lucier’s first electronic works on electroacoustic feedback, I will consider how their research into live electronic music, meant to be performed on stage, announced a whole other form of creation, which was paradoxically emancipated from the concert hall and essential to the emergence of sound art: sound installations. If both musicians first appropriated the electronic medium for its possibilities in sound transformation, it appears that these experimentations, and more precisely those using feedback, quickly extended into areas other than research on tone and the live dimension of electronic performances. Indeed, electroacoustic feedback, as a phenomenon of retroaction, goes beyond the mere relationship to the instrument: by manifesting itself in the looping of the electroacoustic chain (microphone-amplification-speakers), it straightaway inscribes the electronic device in a spatial dimension that is linked to the propagation of sound. By analysing Neuhaus’s and Lucier’s first experiments with feedback, the specificities of their apparatuses and the experiences they aimed to create and foster, this article wishes to question the role these experiments played in the emergence of both musicians’ concern with space, which is at the core of any understanding of their later works. We can then re-read their contribution to the history of live electronic music in the light of both bifurcations and lines of flight inherent in their respective bodies of work, in order to look into the emergence of a certain art of sound installation, in which the liveness of live electronic music, far from being pushed aside, seems to lead into other forms of creation and specific aesthetic questions.

How is performing with responsive technology in a mixed work experienced by performers, and how may the notion of embodied cognition further our understanding of this interaction? These questions are addressed here analysing accounts from singers performing the author’s mixed work Metamorphoses (2015). Combining semi-structured interviews and inspiration from Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, questions concerning the ‘self’ when listening, singing, moving and relating to fellow musicians, as well as the relationship towards the computer, are explored. The results include a notion of the computer as neither separated nor detached but both, and highlight the importance of the situation, including not only the here and now but also social and cultural dimensions. The discussion emphasises the role of sensorimotor interaction and bodily experience in human meaning-making.

This article proposes a perspective on certain practices within experimental music based on a particular understanding of sonic materialism. By tracing correlations and marking divergences between post-spectralism, minimalism, electroacoustic music, glitch and IDM’s offshoots, this article reflects on sound-in-itself, the conception of space and time in music, poietics, perceptual and cultural factors, and suggests that there is a particular understanding of sonic materialism – which I term ecstatic-materialism – that is rooted in a synthesis of perception, theory and embodied actions.

This perspective explores a new expressivity of sound in which the sound itself is the point of convergence for creative impulses and perceptual motives, sound being the common territory between composer and listener. By developing the idea of an ecstatic-sonic-materialism, various works across different genres can be brought together according to this mutual convergence on sound that embodies acoustic properties, intimate traces, external and corporeal experiences.