This article investigates the recent resurgence of kinetic sound art in light of the relationship between art and material. It does this by studying the history of mechanical musical instruments and kinetic art, the role of immateriality in the history of Western art, and the renewed focus on materiality in the arts. Materiality is key to understanding the resurgence of kinetics in sound art. The first part of this article studies the historical narratives of materiality in sound art, while the second part investigates materiality in my own works as more contemporary examples. Here the text turns to exploration of the material and acoustic properties of metal rods and plates, and suggests that direct contact with sound-producing objects provides opportunities for new art forms where the morphology of sound can be developed in dialogue with the physical objects and the surrounding space. By examining the underlying acoustic principles of rods and plates, we get a deeper understanding of the relationship between mathematical models and the actual sounding objects. Using the acoustic model with basic input parameters enables us to explore the timbral possibilities of the sound objects. This allows us to shape the spectrum of acoustic sound objects with great attention to detail, and makes models from spectromorphology relevant during the construction of the objects. The physical production of sound objects becomes both spectral composition and shaping of spatial objects. This highlights the importance of knowledge of both materials and acoustic principles, and questions the traditional perception of sound art and music as immaterial art forms.

This theoretical article investigates context-based compositions where we cannot identify the real-world context from the sounds alone. Examples include Stephen Vitiello’s World Trade Center Recordings: Winds After Hurricane Floyd, Jana Winderen’s The Noisiest Guys on the Planet, Jacob Kirkegaard’s 4 Rooms, Christina Kubisch’s compositions based on observations of the Ruhr district, Anne Niemetz and Andrew Pelling’s The Dark Side of the Cell (2004) as well as Andrea Polli’s Heat and Heartbeat of the City (2004) based on weather data from New York. The article asks how these compositions establish their relation to a specific context. How do they invite the listener to include his or her knowledge of specific contexts? The article suggests four relevant terms that are useful when studying this relation between text and context: paratext, intermediality, enunciation and mediality.

The song of the blackcap (Sylvia atricapilla) has been a subject of fascination among Europeans for centuries. In the first half of the article, I present factors that influenced the evaluation of the bird’s song between the seventeenth and early twentieth centuries, and dedicate the second half to developments in the past sixty years. In the 1950s, two mutually exclusive interpretations of the bird’s song appeared: one connected to Péter Szőke and his sound microscope and the other to Olivier Messiaen and his organ. I draw a parallel between this duality and the ‘sound-based’–‘note-based’ dichotomy that has been naturalised in the discourse about sonic culture during the last decade. I examine what this dichotomy and the natural experience of the blackcap’s song can reveal about one other, shedding light on what may be viewed as the most influential source for this centuries-long fascination.

Western audiences have long been fascinated with music automata. Against this backdrop, it may not be surprising that art and music curators display historical examples of such mechanical instruments together with contemporary sounding art. Yet what exactly do these curators aim to accomplish when combining historical music automata with kinetic sound art? And do visitors understand the connections between the objects on display in the ways intended by the curators? To examine the curators’ ambitions, this article analyses three exhibitions: Für Augen und Ohren (West Berlin 1980), Ballet Mécanique (Maastricht 2002) and Art or Sound (Venice 2014). To unravel visitors’ responses, we focus on the Berlin exhibition, the best documented case. We argue that the curators staged the automated kinetic as a key historical link between mechanical musical instruments and contemporary sound art, and that they tried to tap into specific dimensions of public fascination with musical automata – the magical invisible, mechanical wonder and blurring of boundaries – to open their audiences’ senses to sound art. As we will show with the help of the notion of ‘listening habitus’, visitors’ responses indeed drew on these dimensions, but more often than not displayed a preference for the historical automata rather than contemporary kinetic art.

What is ‘orchestral’ about a networked laptop orchestra? And what is network-like about a classical orchestra? This article juxtaposes orchestras, nineteenth-century music machines and twenty-first-century network music projects. Drawing on organology and cybernetics, it asks how these systems connect people and instruments. It considers interaction and coordination in particular networks, from the panharmonicon to PLork, but also their abstract informational topologies. Ultimately, orchestra machines, old and new, involve both technical and social organisation – and, as such, they can be used to problematise the ontological separation of technology and society.

Contemporary trains of thought largely denounce hylomorphism and a series of dichotomies of the past in favour of rather hybrid, all-inclusive and non-anthropocentric schemata. Yet, the former seem to still pervade our understanding of music and sound art in several respects. For many, composition is a primarily abstract process, musical instruments and audio-related technologies are fixed material means, and artists are creative individuals who are solely and primarily responsible for the artworks they produce. In this article a series of ad hoc and context-dependent compositional traits are scrutinised, with reference to theory as well as to actual artistic practice (both historical and contemporary), and are shown to transcend such assumptions in more or less straightforward ways. In particular, a series of practices is examined that revolves around material inquiry, anti-optimality, and hybrid, reflexive or ‘meta’ interfaces. More, DIWO (Do It With Others) approaches to composition are discussed and shown to echo adhocracy and contextual dependency in various respects and by means of emergent autopoiesis. Certain slants to DIWO are finally examined with respect to a series of powerful (in the author’s opinion) metaphors, namely emergence, transience and post-selfhood.

Since the late twentieth century, the development of cybernetics, physical computing and robotics has led artists and researchers to create musical systems that explore the relationship between human bodies and mechanical systems. Anthropomorphic musical robots and bodily integrated ‘cyborg’ sensor interfaces explore complementary manifestations of what we call the ‘anthropomorphic analogy’, which probes the boundary between human artificer and artificial machine, encouraging listeners and viewers to humanise non-musical machines and understand the human body itself as a mechanical instrument.

These new approaches to the anthropomorphic analogy benefit from historical contextualisation. At numerous points in the history of Western art music, philosophers, critics, composers, performers and instrument designers have considered the relationship between human musician and musical instrument, often blurring the line between the two. Consideration of historical examples enriches understandings of anthropomorphism in contemporary music technology.

This article juxtaposes the anthropomorphic analogy in contemporary musical culture with manifestations of anthropomorphism in early seventeenth-century Europe. The first half of the seventeenth century witnessed a flourishing of instrumentality of all sorts. Musical instruments were linked with the telescope, the clock, the barometer, the paintbrush, and many other instruments and machines, and these came to be understood as vehicles for the creation of knowledge. This flourishing of instrumental culture created new opportunities for contemplation and aesthetic wonder, as theorists considered the line between human being and machine – between nature and artifice. Manifestations of the anthropomorphic analogy in seventeenth-century conceptions of musical instruments help to contextualise and explain similar articulations of the anthropomorphic analogy in the present day.

As a consequence of the universal alphabet of binary code, music is expanding to include transmedia practices. This text suggests that the seemingly exclusive bond between the art form of music and its primary medium, sound, might be opened up to include other media. If the practices of composers who also appear as sound- and kinetic artists are not recognised as music, possible contemporary perspectives on past music is lost and the future development of music is inhibited.

The author presents an artistic perspective on transmediality, where two questions are addressed. The first is whether or not a transmedial structure can be made with light, movement and sound – and if so, how is this done? A strategy for transmedial composition with light, sound and movement is proposed, and exemplified with hand drawings. The second question raised in this article concerns whether or not transmedial compositions result in music. An idea of music as organised time is developed, and includes a discussion on the exclusive relation between art form and medium, especially between sound and music.

This article discusses the affordances of soundscape composition and how the techniques and approaches of this genre have been embraced as an inter-disciplinary research methodology. Since its emergence from the World Soundscape Project, the concept of soundscape composition has set out to enhance our listening awareness of our soundscapes, inspiring and establishing a discourse that explores a sense of place through sound. Soundscape composition over the past decades has established itself as a popular compositional practice among acousmatic composers utilising compositional techniques that go beyond phonographic representation of acoustic environments. Electroacoustic techniques explore not only the transformation and processing of field recordings but also the spatialisation and performance techniques used to create immersive and realistic soundscapes. These compositional developments since the establishment of the World Soundscape Project have brought this genre of music to a wider audience as it has developed into a cross-disciplinary practice. Soundscape studies methodologies such as soundwalking, listening and recording are being utilised by a broader research cohort outside of soundscape composition. This article provides a survey of recent projects and compositions that incorporate a soundscape and cross-disciplinary approach that reflects a variety of cultural themes and issues within the disciplines of social, political and cultural science.

This article explores our audiovisual collaborative outputs and the methods employed to negotiate converging and diverging creative directions in the production of artistic works, in the context of philosophies that influence our thinking-making processes, as well the engagement with new modes of artistic practice. A key feature connecting our collaborations is site-specific field recordings of audio and visual materials. Our work has spanned Canada, the United States and New Zealand, producing a catalogue of works that are intrinsically linked to geographic and everyday phenomena. To support our discussion of the creative process, we critique one recent work, Aspects of Trees (2013, 2015), as a case study that synthesises concerns associated with collaboration, while also illustrating the recent sharp turn in our individual practices. The outcome is a reorientation of our thinking-making procedures, including ideas of subjective experiences of time, place and the agency of human and non-human bodies.

This article seeks to articulate the interaction between archival sound recordings and the contemporary media, arguing that digitisation and post-digital mediation have led to the interpretation of historical sound recordings as object-disoriented sonic artefacts drifting through the contemporary media environment. Investigating past, current and ongoing sound-based artistic projects and artworks as case studies, the article substantiates the argument by addressing questions of identity, mediation and interpretation in the post-digital condition of contemporary media. These projects are examined in order to gain understanding of how the source materials are often derived from older sounds, such as the pre-electric era early sound recordings made in India on shellacs and cylinders, and how they are reused in artistic production following their re-interpretation as object-disoriented sonic artefacts.

This article shows how the theremin as a new musical medium enacted a double logic throughout its century-old techno-cultural life. On the one hand, in an attempt to be a ‘better’ instrument, the theremin imitated or remediated traditional musical instruments and in this way affirmed the musical values these instruments materialised; simultaneously, by being a new and different medium, with unprecedented flexibility for designing sound and human–machine interaction, it eroded and challenged these same values and gradually enacted change. On the other hand, the theremin inadvertently inaugurated a practice of musical instrument circulation using electronics schematics that allowed for the instrument’s reproduction, starting with the publication of schematics and tutorials in amateur electronics magazines and which can be seen as a predecessor to today’s circulation of open source code. This circulation practice, which I call instrument-code transduction, emerged from and was amplified by the fame the theremin obtained using its touchless interface to imitate or remediate traditional musical instruments, and in turn, this circulation practice has kept the instrument alive throughout the decades. Thus remediation and code-instrument transduction are not just mutually dependent, but are in fact, two interdependent processes of the same media phenomenon. Drawing from early reactions to the theremin documented in the press, from new media theory, and from publications in amateur electronics, this article attempts to use episodes from the history of the theremin to understand the early and profound changes that electric technologies brought to the concept of musical instruments at large.

The social and sociological implications of what David Beer calls the ‘precarious double life’ of the recording engineer – a technical professional on one hand, an artistic one on the other – are only recently coming to the fore in scholarship. Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network theory and the Social Construction of Technology theory pioneered by Trevor Pinch, as well as the contributions of Susan Schmidt-Horning and Beer himself, have begun to give us an intellectual framework to examine how social forces shape sound technology and the variegated implications of that shaping.

This article examines the case of the ‘bilingualism’ required of the recording engineer. Drawing on primary sources from across the twentieth century, it traces the case of scientific terminology becoming musical terminology, that musical terminology becoming ingrained in consumer culture, and that ingrained, well-understood musical terminology becoming, finally, metaphorical.

We trace the case of spectral terminology from Joseph P. Maxfield’s articles explaining electromechanical recording to a general audience in the publication Scientific American in the 1930 s, through the application of spectral terminology in advertising during the hi-fi boom of the midcentury, and finally to the metaphorical use of the same terminology in popular music in the last two decades of the century. We show, then, that it is not only the audio engineer, but also their terminology itself that participates in a ‘double life’.

Cheryl E. Leonard is a San Francisco-based composer, performer and instrument maker who utilises sounds from natural objects and field recordings to create innovative compositions that are aesthetically appealing and also promote environmental awareness. This article examines Leonard’s work Antarctica: Music from the Ice (2009–2014), which comprises ten context-based pieces created from sounds produced with natural objects (such as penguin bones, rocks and shells) and field recordings the composer collected during her visit to Antarctica in 2008–9. In particular, the article focuses on the pieces Lullaby for E Seals, White on White, Greater than 20 Knots and Ablation Zone, showing how Leonard draws attention to pertinent environmental issues through her work, while at the same time producing compositions that are aurally pleasing and engaging for performers and listeners alike.

OB-scene is a performance centred on a live sonification of biological data gathered in real-time with a medical vaginal probe (photoplethysmograph), made by the author. The use of the photoplethysmograph, which takes inspiration from the first medical vaginal probes used for diagnostic purposes by Masters and Johnson (1966) introduces a media-archaeological aspect to this work. Data gathered through the probe is processed and transformed into sound and visuals projected in the exhibition space. OB-scene takes inspiration from Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter (2010) in which she argues that human agency has echoes in non-human nature and vice versa, shifting away from anthropocentrism towards the concept of ‘vital materiality’ that runs across bodies, both humans and unhuman. Furthermore, OB-scene is affiliated with an emerging movement of women and technology called ‘XenoFeminism’ (XF). It introduces the idea of techno-alienation and focuses on the concept of other/diverse desires, new forms of desiring, experiencing something other (Laboria Cuboniks 2015). In this specific work, this takes the form of a technofeminism incorporating the fluid, the non-human and the diverse. In this performance, the body is fused with the technology, rather than empowered or enhanced by technology itself, body and technology become a unique actant (Latour 2009) enabling the audience to experience the sensorial assemblage as a space for communal experience with political implications. OB-scene is as an immersive environmental work where the senses, affect and memory were key features of ‘assemblage thinking’ (Hamilakis 2017).

Knut Wiggen (1927–2016) is not a household name in music technology, despite the fact that he developed cutting-edge technology during the 1960s and early 1970s in Stockholm, as leader of both the concert organisation Fylkingen and the Electronic Music Studio (EMS). In the international literature on computer music, this development has only been mentioned in passing, if at all. However, EMS and the general development has been discussed in Scandinavian texts,1 but the links between Knut Wiggen’s technical achievements and his far-reaching ambitions for the music of the future, and how this vision aligned with philosophy and research at the time, have not been the focus. Hartenstein (2011) provides insights into Wiggen’s personal intentions and philosophy, and does not go much into technical detail, Groth (2010) focuses principally on the politics and aesthetic differences and subsequent conflicts at EMS, and although an overview of the EMS technology is provided, it is not always made clear how innovative it was. In Broman (2007), the broader lines of electroacoustic musical development are in focus.

Wiggen combined social and political concerns with technical insight, and his overarching conviction of how a new art was necessary as a counterweight to mute consumerism is unique in computer music. The aim of this article is to describe and explain the coherency of Wiggen’s achievements, his philosophy, his use of current technological advances and research and his development of a new method for composing the music of the future. In order to support this focus, mainly primary sources have been used,2 however, the literature mentioned above has been consulted due to its use of interview data and other personal communication not commonly available. A degree of duplication of information has been required for the narrative not to suffer.

The article will show that Wiggen was a visionary pioneer who has a natural place among such computer music luminaries as Max Mathews, Jean-Claude Risset, John Chowning, Iannis Xenakis, Peter Zinovieff and others from the same generation.

I have taken the ambiguous psychology of Kinaesthetic Empathy and the relatively recent ideas that form Extended Mind Theory and re-contextualised them so they are relevant to sound-based live performance. I then used these psychologies as a guidance to investigate how we interact with discreet and invasive instruments by analysing specific examples of performance, sound installation and composition. I have defined ‘invasive and discreet’ by using examples of how these instruments are presented as objects in the context of performance. For example, the way in which an object or system can physically invade, and make use of, the performance space when employing technology and physical sculpture; or how an object or system can interact with the performer through tactility and psychological presence. During the process of defining discreet and invasive instruments I noted that there is no binary differentiation because the instruments denotation is dependent on context, sound palette and how they are interpreted as objects for creative expression by the performer. I concluded that the physicality of invasive instruments gives strength to the presentation of ideas in live performance. This is in opposition to discrete instruments which I argue are better suited to studio production or acousmatic performance.