This article proposes an analytical perspective on the aural analysis of human–machine interaction. Starting from Pierre Schaeffer’s musical thinking, it focuses on the perception of sound morphologies that generate from human–machine interaction. This interaction, usually interpreted under the perspective of the devices and technological innovation, will be interpreted through the perspective of musical perception and semantics. In the article, the author applies the criterion of ‘allure’, that permits the analysis of the sound object’s sustain and indicates the sound agent as mechanical, living or natural. ‘Allure’ is used as a theoretical framework for the analysis of human–computer interaction (HCI) in music. Inspired by a hypothetical perceptive Turing’s test, the author employs the ‘allure’ criterion as a conceptual tool for an aural analysis of human–machine interaction: aural analysis can indeed reveal the interaction of sound agents through the cognitive mechanism of motor imagery. This approach can be extended and developed in music information retrieval. The author will develop this reflection showing the actuality of Schaeffer’s perspective in HCI analysis. Finally, to highlight the interaction between human and electronic sound sources, the author will consider a case study: the first movement of Traiettoria for piano and electronics by Marco Stroppa.

This article counters the canonical histories of electronic music that traditionally begin with Cahill’s Telharmonium and find their historical centre in the activities of the Paris and Cologne studios of the mid-twentieth century. The concept of ‘failed histories’ is introduced here with three important examples. The first chronicles the career of electromusical innovator Johann Baptist Schalkenbach (1824–1910). The second example examines Britain’s earliest electronic sound performance in 1895, signalling a rupture between electromusical bombast and the detailed, quiet work of the experimental laboratory. The third episode looks at the wireless oscillation outrages of the 1920s and 1930s, where electronic tone prematurely trespassed upon musical culture. Taken together, these failed histories offer an alternative narrative of electronic music finding its voice (and losing its voice) in turn-of-the-century Britain.

This article re-orientates Denis Smalley’s work on spectromorphology and space-form through a case study of electronic dance music (EDM) on YouTube. An EDM track and its related YouTube comments are analysed concurrently in order to examine how sound-shapes and sonic spatiality are experienced in practice on the social web. Using Stephen Feld’s notion of acoustemology as a theoretical base, I argue that semantic and somantic ways of knowing through sound are thoroughly entangled. A hybrid acoustemology model is outlined, merging spectromorphology and space-form with elements of ecosemiotics and music psychology. The model is then deployed during an acoustemology of the trance/breakbeat track Finished Symphony by Hybrid (1999). Selected YouTube comments on Finished Symphony uploads are coded deductively using the descriptive system of Gabrielsson and Wik (2003). A larger set of comments is subsequently collected for inductive content analysis, which highlights some wider issues relating to the words we use for music and sound. The article concludes by calling for vantage point shifts in music research.

In this article I explore the relationship of theories of sound reproduction formulated in the decades between the two world wars with the studio practice of Pierre Schaeffer. I argue that the 1920s–1930s was a period of significance for sound-based arts, and compare it to analogous defining moments in cinema and art photography. After examining the legacy of this period, I turn to one specific moment from Schaeffer’s early studio experiments with musique concrète in April 1948, showing how the theories of sound reproduction formed in the earlier time period informed practical decisions in Schaeffer’s working methods at a critical time when his ideas about the sound object were forming. Schaeffer’s studio practice and, to an extent, his theories of listening thus carry traces of this prior sonic culture. Considering the decisive influence of Schaeffer’s writings and teaching on later generations and developments in electroacoustic music, I speculate on the proliferation of these ideas beyond Schaeffer’s immediate circle, focusing in particular on soundscape composition. The title of this article is a reference to James Lastra’s ‘invisible auditor’, a term he coined to characterise the approach to sound reproduction discussed in this article (Lastra 2000: 159).

On reflection upon my own experience as a composer in theory and practice, I find that terms not only define but also propose. In finding words for spatial texture, I have discovered that spatial texture itself is always proposing: motion of sound suggests texture of space. The texture of space creates an elusive materiality. Form is no better than formlessness.

Standard histories of electronic music tend to trace the lineage of musique concrète as lying mainly in the Futurists’ declarations of the 1910s, through Cage’s ‘emancipation’ of noise in the 1930s, to Schaeffer’s work and codifications of the late 1940s and early 1950s. This article challenges this narrative by drawing attention to the work of filmmakers in the 1930s that foreshadowed the sound experiments of Pierre Schaeffer and thus offers an alternative history of their background. The main focus of the article is on the innovations within documentary film and specifically the sonic explorations in early British documentary that prefigured musique concrète, an area ignored by electronic music studies. The theoretical and philosophical underpinnings of the documentary movement’s members, particularly their leader John Grierson, will be compared with those of Pierre Schaeffer, and the important influence of Russian avant-garde filmmaking on the British (and musique concrète) will be addressed. Case studies will focus on the groundbreaking soundtracks of two films made by the General Post Office Film Unit that feature both practical and theoretical correspondences to Schaeffer: 6.30 Collection (1934) and Coal Face (1935). Parallels between the nature and use of technologies and how this affected creative outputs will also be discussed, as will the relationship of the British documentary movement’s practice and ideas to post-Schaefferian ‘anecdotal music’ and the work of Luc Ferrari.

To better understand the function of sound within electronic music it is inevitable to consider the way composers and performers talk about such sound and its different qualities. An attempt to classify sound is a logical consequence of the desire to orient oneself in a vast field of possibilities. It remains difficult, however, to relate such a classification to the intuitive way we talk about sound. Heavily influenced by our individual upbringing, cultural and musical environment and, perhaps most strongly, by our peers in the creation and performance of music, words verbalised in relation to sound and music invite a systematic investigation. This article exemplifies such an investigation, attempting the elicitation and structuring of a vocabulary from eight musically trained individuals in a two-stage experiment. The words examined here are concerned with sounds created by transformation of acoustic sources through electronic processing methods.

In the literature dedicated to twentieth-century music, the early history of electronic music is regularly presented hand in hand with the development of technical repetitive devices such as closed grooves and magnetic tape loops. Consequently, the idea that such devices were ‘invented’ in the studios of the first great representatives of electronic music tends to appear as an implicit consequence. However, re-examination of the long history of musical technology, from the ninth-century Banu Musa automatic flute to the Hammond organ of the 1930s, reveals that repetitive devices not only go right back to the earliest days of musical automation, but also evolved in a wide variety of contexts wholly unconnected from any form of musical institution. This article aims to shed light on this other, forgotten, history of repetitive audio technologies.

The discipline of electroacoustic music is most commonly associated with acousmatic musical forms such as tape-music and musique concrète, and the electroacoustic historical canon primarily centres around the mid-twentieth-century works of Pierre Schaeffer, Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Cage and related artists. As the march of technology progressed in the latter half of the twentieth century, alternative technologies opened up new areas within the electroacoustic discipline such as computer music, hyper-instrument performance and live electronic performance. In addition, the areas of electromagnetic actuation and musical robotics also allowed electroacoustic artists to actualise their works with real-world acoustic sound-objects instead of or along side loudspeakers. While these works owe much to the oft-cited pioneers mentioned above, there exists another equally significant alternative history of artists who utilised electric, electronic, pneumatic, hydraulic and other sources of power to create what is essentially electroacoustic music without loudspeakers. This article uncovers this ‘missing history’ and traces it to its earliest roots over a thousand years ago to shed light on often-neglected technological and artistic developments that have shaped and continue to shape electronic music today.

This article seeks to explore the proposed notion of ‘context-based composition’ by examining the nature of ‘real-world’ context. It does this by studying the way in which listeners interpret sounds, working towards a deeper understanding of what it is that we mean by ‘real-world’ sound and context-based composition. These discussions are then utilised to explore the concept of what it means to compose context-based works and suggests that new potentials are opened up by a closer examination of the definition of context-based composition, one which liberates itself from a concern over an absolute physical nature of sounds and which embraces the use of both abstract and referential sounds. This journey highlights the importance of memory and experience within processes of interpretation and the creation of context-based compositions, and questions divisions between the virtual and the real.

This article considers the concept of a ‘language of things’, which Pierre Schaeffer developed in his early work, the Essai sur la radio et le cinema (1941–42). On the basis of a careful consideration of this text, it will appear that the ‘language of things’ engages a specific posture that shows, in the process of concrete music’s emergence, two distinct but interrelated aspects: one concerning things themselves and the other concerning language. It is this knot, this interwovenness, that we will try to understand in this article. The article will show that the promotion of noise is directly linked to the deconstruction of language and that these two processes, which can be precisely identified in Schaeffer’s early works, refer to a fundamental switch, signalling the birth of musique concrète.

This article proposes the audio reality effect as a meaningful translation of Roland Barthes’s literary reality effect to the sonic realm. This refinement of transcontextuality and source recognition is applied to electroacoustic music and soundscape composition using the works and writings of Emmerson, Truax, Wishart, Smalley, Fischman, Young, Norman and Field. Lastly, this study mimetically analyses 2 seconds / b minor / wave by Michael Pisaro and Taku Sugimoto in order to demonstrate the relevance of mimesis and the audio reality effect for understanding current musical practice.

This article considers the place of William W. H. ‘Bill’ Gunn in the history of electroacoustic music with a focus on one of his earliest creative forays, the 1955 production of A Day in Algonquin Park, a composition in the genre of what the authors have dubbed the circadian audio portrait. In exploring Gunn’s compositional decisions and the political and creative contexts which surrounded them, we detail his sonic practice and make the argument that Gunn was a soundscape composer before the term was coined, a forerunner of the genre indebted to composers connected with the World Soundscape Project. In doing so, we must acknowledge the ways in which the album’s creation and reception play out paradoxical aspects of the wilderness myth, while feeding into the construction of a popular and idealised Canadian identity. We also find his modernist ecological sensibility struggling to articulate a place for human visitors within nature: in this, Gunn’s outlook and concerns were not very different from some contemporary soundscape composers. However, this study goes beyond acknowledging a previously ‘unknown father’ of familiar sounds and debates; in contextualising his work with environmental sound as a contribution to the genre of the circadian audio portrait, we highlight an alternative genealogy for contemporary soundscape composition.