The question of notation in electroacoustic music has long been vexed. Common practice notation emerged from centuries of Western art music practice to prescribe pitch, duration, dynamics and increasingly refined performance instructions for acoustic instruments. Yet electroacoustic music—with its emphasis on timbre, texture, spatial behaviour, emergent processes and the creative transformation of sound—resists inscription within this inherited symbolic system. The problem is not merely that common practice notation fails to capture certain parameters adequately; rather, it embeds assumptions about musical material, temporal organisation and the relationship between score, instrument and sound that fundamentally misalign with many electroacoustic practices. If we accept the consensus that common practice notation is no longer fit for purpose in this domain—or that it ever was—what might replace it? This special issue of Organised Sound gathers 14 papers that address this question from diverse disciplinary, aesthetic and technological perspectives.

Rather than proposing successor notations, the contributions in this edition of Organised Sound reveal notation as a site for creative experimentation, a conceptual space where assumptions about composition, performance, instruments and listening are actively renegotiated. The papers collected here frame the inadequacy of certain types and approaches to notation in electroacoustic music as productive—generating new theoretical frameworks, novel representational strategies and more complicated relationships between composers, scores, performers, instruments and audiences.

Recent scholarship has traced how the musical score has transformed from primarily a documentary or prescriptive device into a space for digital, creative exploration. Yet this observation, while valuable, risks flattening the specificities of different notational problems and practices. Electroacoustic music presents particular challenges precisely because of its hybrid nature: much contemporary practice involves acoustic instruments alongside electronic sound generation, live processing and algorithmic systems. Performance situations may incorporate emergence, stochastic operations, planned and unplanned collisions of autonomous algorithms and responsive improvisation from human performers navigating sound controllers or traditional instruments. This hybridity demands notation that can be simultaneously prescriptive and permissive, fixed and flexible, precise and open.

The relationship between instruments and notation receives sustained attention across several papers. These instrument-focused papers collectively suggest that notation in electroacoustic music is difficult to separate from organology. As can be understood through the history of Western or Eurological music, the instrument and its notation co-evolve: each shapes the possibilities of the other. This mutual constitution challenges traditional assumptions about certain approaches to notation as a neutral medium of inscription, revealing it instead as always already imbricated with material practices and technological affordances.

Technology-mediated systems such as creative AI, network music performance, augmented instruments and chaotic systems are examined below. When musical structures emerge from algorithmic processes, stochastic operations or generative systems, what role does notation play? For this category, notation must capture the logic of the process rather than any finished sonic outcome, a perspective illustrated in these studies of chaotic synthesisers, generative timbre spaces and even queer-theory-informed notational proposals.

The contemporary notations framework developed by Pierre-Luc Lecours and Nicolas Bernier opens the issue with a typology of new forms of notation based on a review of the scientific literature comprising over 250 documents. They organise their results by notation approaches (action based, animated, graphic, etc.), encoding (indication, semantic and temporal) and mediums used for transmission (screen, print, etc.). They have designed an adaptive framework that is meant to be expanded while working towards a terminological standardisation.

David Kim-Boyle explores how ‘three-dimensional scores create fundamentally different performance possibilities then their two-dimensional counterparts’. By considering artificial visual architectures as an extended cognitive system, he suggests that this creates new forms of musical agency and open temporal ontologies. For example, he likens the navigational and interactive affordances of three-dimensional musical space to Debord’s theory of dérive, a concept of pyscho-geographic navigational behaviour in urban settings, leading to an aesthetics of spatial materiality.

By applying Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological approach to interactive electroacoustic music, Nolan Hildebrand embraces open graphic notation as a guide to live performer–chaotic system (e.g., the no-input mixer) interaction. With the notion of ‘an interpretive feedback loop’, he triangulates the presence of machinic destabilisation, his action-based visual score language and the live performer’s embodied intuitive response (gestalt) to both.

Ken Fields embraces the feature (no bug) of latency in network music. With these early studies of toporhythmic variance—the multifaceted manifestation of rhythms in trans-local contexts—he (with composer Ethan Cayko) iterates a system of circular/ring scores, attempting to capture the elusive phenomenology of time–space offsets using loops. Technologically, it’s not difficult, using socket.io to distribute dynamic p5.js scores in real-time widely over the planet during a performance. What is difficult to reflect, however, is how this multiplicity of mutually engaged local interfaces, each in their own here and now, represents all the other (there and then) musical perspectives of a temporally disjunct networked event. Chronotechnics is the art of the alignment of off-phase temporalities. Through this concept, Fields focuses on the process of tuning or tempering a complex network acoustic.

Rob Casey’s article, Indexical Notation for Sound Morphologies, explores a third dimension of Peirce’s trilogy of types of signs: icon, symbols and indices. He notes that modern approaches to typologies and spectro-morphologies have been primarily symbolic/interpretive and iconic in nature, while indexical signs have a more direct, causal/contiguous connection to their object (smoke to fire). Casey then explores the agential potential of notation, which can take on the role of being a more ‘active, dynamic participant in the flow of actions and experiencing that constitutes music making’. Ironically, his approach to this end is to subvert familiar Western notational noteheads and staff lines towards this de-symbolising process.

Nicola Privato and Thor Magnusson dive into Eco’s concept of the open work—of the first and second degree—before they suggest an openness of a third degree: by exploring two open notational forms (inherent and text scores) in the encounter with creative AI, the haunted work emerges. Mouja+, their case study, has an elaborate pipeline, including a prompt jockey (text score), physical exploration of the latent spectral space (inherent score) using neural audio synthesis complemented by real-time resynthesis—not to mention multichannel ambisonic spatialisation. The multiple agencies involved in the work are not accidental, but an exploration of the indeterminate, multi-ordered openness that evokes the hauntological.

Cat Hope’s digital spatial notation positions sound in space as a constitutive audiovisual practice, recognising that electroacoustic music often operates through spatial diffusion and movement, and examines how scores can also undertake a similar role. Using an artistic research approach, a theoretical framework is applied to the curation of presentation and performance of a collection of works in the ‘Drawing Sound in Space’ concert experience.

Mattias Sköld’s work is motivated by the need to move away from ‘individual tailor-made solutions’ in rationalising notation for digital music instruments. Especially when it comes to performance with modular synthesis set-ups, the diversity of architectures is almost always unique, yet Sköld doesn’t think this necessarily relates to an infinite amount of sound capabilities. Thus, his work extends the notational heritage of Schaeffer, Smalley and Thoressen, while seeking a graphic method to map sets of modular parameters to the primary sonic archetypes (e.g., (ir)regular pulse categories).

The notational case study offered by Cristopher Ramos Flores and Jorge Rodrigo Sigal Sefchovich is for augmented instruments: acoustic instruments extended through sensors, processing and digital control. The limited study is strategic, suggesting that a standard notational practice can facilitate not only the development of ‘augmented instruments and the music written for them’ but also the field of electroacoustic music in general. The work is then anchored more broadly to the tripartite ontological framework of Score, Performance and Medium, which, significantly, is accompanied by the semantic augmentation of their non-italicised counterparts.

David Caulet’s examination of graphic notation strategies for effect pedals in his own work, entitled Etude n°1, is ‘considered as support for the work that is embodied in the performance’. This paper, similar to Flores’ argument on this issue, supports the view that augmented and peripheral devices should now be understood as central compositional tools requiring their own thoughtful notational considerations. Together, an appreciation of the distributed agencies that embody a work slowly emerges.

Enrique Tomás examines the historical and theoretical foundations of the concept of an ‘instrument’s inherent score’, relating this to a ‘state space’ of affordances. If, for the performer, the instrument’s score emerges from the material and symbolic affordances of the instrument, then for the composer, the building of such an instrument is an intentional act of composition. The author, drawing from his deep experience with tangible scores, discerns that the boundaries between composition, instrument and performance are continually blurred in such cases.

Vincenzo Madaghiele, Leonard Lund, Derek Holzer, Tejaswinee Kelkar, Kıvanç Tatar and Andre Holzapfel examine the interactive three-dimensional ‘latent’ timbre space of the Benjolin chaotic synthesiser as mapped to fixed parameter states of the system. With chaotic systems, even fixed states exhibit sonic evolution as an essential part of their aesthetic. Enter the Meta-Benjolin, as a ‘notation system and a meta-instrument’, which correlates the synthesiser’s parameter states to its sonic model. As such, the exploration of this interactive virtual instrument can represent the logic of its generative processes.

Jaslyn Robertson’s proposal for queernotation as a process leading to experimental compositional practices pushes these questions in a different direction, asking how notation might resist normative constraints and embrace alternative organisational logics by engaging queer erotics, temporalities and utopia theories in a practice-based approach. Robertson uses examples of their own work as exemplars of this approach.

In addition to the above-mentioned thematic articles, Polina A. Stolbova and Gleb G. Rogozinski examine generative soundscape installations in (virtual) exhibition contexts. They explore synthesis techniques (stochastic, subtractive, layered, oscillatory, spatial) that attempt to morphologically mimic complex real environmental soundscapes using CSound.