There is growing evidence of widespread acceptance of timbre as a primary surface feature and as a structural device in music across genres. This is a result of a growing body of source material available in musical contexts through recording and sampling. Composers using new sounds are creating new musical syntax and structures, and consequently, new contexts and paradoxical or ‘synchretic’ situations that motivate resolution by the listener. New source materials, syntax, structure and synchresis pose challenges for the analyst in this largely non-notated music as well. Research in perception and the formation of conceptual frameworks is providing key information towards understanding this growing timbral common practice and how to talk about it with cogency and depth.

The work of Pierre Schaeffer (theorist, composer and inventor of musique concrète) bears a complex relationship to the philosophical school of phenomenology. Although often seen as working at the periphery of this movement, this paper argues that Schaeffer's effort to ground musical works in a ‘hybrid discipline’ is quite orthodox, modelled upon Husserl's foundational critique of both ‘realism’ and ‘psychologism’. As part of this orthodoxy, Schaeffer develops his notion of the ‘sound object’ along essentialist (eidetic) lines. This has two consequences: first, an emphasis is placed on ‘reduced listening’ over indicative and communicative modes of listening; secondly, the ‘sound object’ promotes an ahistorical ontology of musical material and technology. Despite frequent references to Schaeffer and the ‘sound object’ in recent literature on networked music, concatenative synthesis and high-level music descriptors, the original phenomenological context in which Schaeffer's work developed is rarely revisited. By critically exploring Schaeffer's theorising of the ‘sound object’, this paper aims at articulating the distance between contemporary and historical usage of the term.

The capacity for electroacoustic music to project and manipulate sonic images is now acknowledged as a cornerstone of the medium's aesthetic potential. The notion of imagery may be used in a range of ways, reflecting electroacoustic music's potential to present sound ‘documents’ re-contextualised from real-world experience, as well as to project more abstract entities in which the concept of an image may give coherent form to fantastical constructs, frequently driven by the transforming and distortive effects of signal processing. This paper investigates the practical application of these distinctions in electroacoustic music, largely through reflective discussion of the author's own working methods, and evaluates ways in which the aesthetic effects of signal processing can influence the nature and construction of sound images. Within this, Denis Smalley's concept of the indicative field is used as a conceptual tool for the characterisation and analysis of the affective dimensions of sound image construction and manipulation.

The analytical discussion of acousmatic music can benefit from being based on spatial concepts, and this article aims to provide a framework for investigation. A personal experience of soundscape listening is the starting point, and uncovers basic ideas relating to the disposition and behaviour of sounding content, and listening strategy. This enables the opening out of the discussion to include source-bonded sounds in general, giving particular consideration to how experience of sense modes other than the aural are implicated in our understanding of space, and in acousmatic listening. Attention then shifts to a source-bonded spatial model based on the production of space by the gestural activity of music performance, prior to focusing in more detail on acousmatic music, initially by delving into spectral space, where ideas about gravitation and diagonal forces are germane. This leads to concepts central to the structuring of perspectival space in relation to the vantage point of the listener. The final section considers a methodology for space-form investigation.

In the domain of music for performers and electronic sounds (whether fixed or live) there are various paradigms of interaction: the performer(s) may be situated in an electroacoustic ‘environment’; there may be a primarily responsorial or ‘proliferating’ relationship; or the relationship may be closer to the traditional one between soloist and accompaniment. These paradigms preserve a relatively unproblematic dichotomy between performer, whose sound is inextricably linked to a sense of action, presence and spontaneity, and fixed or treated sound, which is more or less de-coupled from this presence. Once one tries to create a continuous, intimate relation between the two, so that one is dealing with an extension of the instrument rather than an emulated ‘other’ or environmental context, one is confronted with a fundamental difference between a sounding body whose physical properties transparently determine its sonic possibilities, and the loudspeaker, which can produce practically any sound at all. This paper interrogates this dichotomy between the fallible-corporeal and the fixed-disembodied, activating questions both about the social fact of live performance and about the compositional practices which give rise to a sense of extended instrumentality.

The advance of technology brings about modifications of style, performing techniques, music listening, and brings to us new relationships between creation, interpretation and perception. The aim of this article is to set out an approach to strategies of musical production for acoustic instruments and technological resources, describing different notions of interaction where the electroacoustic textural complexity coexists with the live processing of the instrumental source and where a goal is to work within the frame of an open and easy-to-carry-out performance structure which is friendly to the musicians, clear as a discourse and attractive to the audience.

This article looks at the compositional processes of hip-hop teams based in the UK, focusing on those that have emerged from the practice of creating team ‘routines’. Turntable teams, such as the Scratch Perverts, the Mixologists and the DMU Crew, do not create their original compositions from within the Western art tradition of an independent artist creating work in isolation, which is then communicated to performers through staff notation. Instead, turntable teams compose and perform as a collective to create original compositions from existing records, and in doing so have developed innovative compositional strategies.

To be able to analyse and discuss the creative processes of hip-hop turntable teams it has been necessary to construct my own model framework to enable me to identify similar patterns in the creative processes of the teams discussed. In the article, I discuss and analyse one routine from each of the three teams using this framework, focusing on the emergent process of ‘collective creation’. The article concludes by establishing a number of characteristics of the compositional processes used by UK turntable teams. Until now, scholarship has neglected the music of hip-hop. Previous work on hip-hop music has been concerned with either sociological or cultural and historical aspects. This article offers a new approach to hip-hop scholarship because it focuses on the actual music of turntable teams and the emergent processes that have developed to create it.

We discuss John Locke's ideas in his essay of 1690 on sound and its cognition and relation to bodily motion. The ideas have interesting implications for the construction of organised sound. We argue that our ecological and statistical experience of sounds in our natural (and man-made) environment is in several respects critical for our choices as soundsmiths and our impressions as listeners. Sonic repetition, both sensory and imag(in)ed, contributes to that environment. Input sounds may be ‘coupled’ to output sounds; and in some cases the physical processes generating sound and the cognitive processes of receiving them are joined. As music technologists we may think of the computer, our sonic vehicle, as a joined bodily sonic-prosthesis. ‘Simple’ sonic ideas may associate with each other through shared biological bases, and become tools for creation of ‘complex’ ideas, as Locke cogitates. Furthermore, we now have new routes towards such complex sounds, including our computer prostheses.