This article traces the history of the use and reception of field recordings on radio, in France and Britain, outside the categories considered as art or music such as hörspiel or musique concrète. It shows that radio producers had diverse reactions to the use of sonic ambiences recorded in the field. There was an opposition between a ‘Pure Sound School’, which promoted the use of field recordings instead of voice to depict the environment where the reporter was, and a school that privileged voice. If the use of recordings of sonic ambiences was not new, their utilisation on radio as elements autonomous in themselves was. They were falling between categories: they were not reports (because of the absence of voice), they were not musique concrète (because sounds were not modified and were presented within their context, that is, not as sound objects), they were not sound effects (because they lasted several minutes and could be composed through editing), and they were not wildlife recordings (because wildlife could be absent). Sonic ambiences were new sonic objects that took time to digest. This time also represented a listening mutation, and this will be analysed through the beginnings of radio documentaries and the works of sound hunters.

This article attends to the emergence of musique concrète as a theoretical object in Pierre Schaeffer’s writing between 1941 and 1952, seeing it as the logical endpoint of Schaeffer’s quest for an art proper to the radio. In this strong sense of the word, art is here positioned in opposition to entertainment, and as such Schaeffer seeks to separate the properly radiophonic from the impure, mercenary forms that radio had hitherto adopted. Schaeffer’s account of musique concrète follows this logic, seeking to cast off the vestiges of radio drama that remain audible in such works as Symphonie pour un homme seul. By way of conclusion, I suggest that grasping the entanglement of musique concrète with mass-cultural forms such as radio requires a mode of reading oriented not towards formalism or sonic ontology but towards the figure of the text.

This article explores the role of the radio as an artistic instrument. It discusses both contemporary and historical art experiments, namely those where the sound of the radio or the form of radio reception is an important aspect of the final work. We examine the question, ‘What does it mean for a radio to be an instrument?’ And to clarify, we mean any kind of instrument, not just a musical one. To answer this question, this article focuses on the concepts and theory of those Polish artists who have used radio in their artwork, either as the source of a particular type of sound or as a medium that collects and transmits the sound of its surroundings.

As a medium for information, entertainment and communication, radio had taken precedence over television for decades, at least in terms of its accessibility in all households. Television and later the internet never completely annulled its aural condition, while its form altered to keep up with developments in terms of asynchrony or subject areas. Today it is considered the predominantly ‘cool medium’. Recent developments in television and the internet’s ways of operating render it a more detached medium than the alternative, given that a medium can change ‘temperature’ over time depending on the use (Levinson 2001: 108). But what about its accessibility to d/Deaf and Hard-of-hearing groups? Are these communities excluded by default from radio programmes and artistic creation through radiophonic media? In this article I analyse a case study, ‘Tangible Radio – Class on Air’ workshop, as part of B-AIR Creative Europe programme, as well as the convergences of sound art and the deaf experience in terms of co-creation, participation and educational processes. I will argue that radio as a medium can very successfully include the d/Deaf and Hard-of-hearing communities if relevant methodologies and technologies are encompassed to its processes.

In 2003, a new radio programme called Radioatelier was launched as part of the Czech Radio 3 – Vltava broadcast, the national public service art channel. It was aimed at presenting experimental radio forms, something completely unprecedented at that time. With 213 new commissions by December 2022, the programme entered its third decade of existence, having won a number of major radio art awards, while facing threats of impending programme cancellation in 2023. The present article is quite personal, offering generational insights of the producer, who was privileged enough to set goals and scope of the programme in its initial stages and who went on to co-exist with it for the following two decades. It also presents the complete list of sound compositions commissioned by Radioatelier between 2003 and 2022.

Considered as an artistic medium, airwaves are not neutral, nor are they immaterial. The decision to broadcast is linked to the decision to activate electronic circuits. Radio holds both propagandistic and subversive potentials. But even the most experimental broad- or webcasts rely on electronic or digital technologies. Thus, responsible radio productions cannot shy away from a self-critical, and political positioning in this regard. What political implications does it have for radio art that transmission rests on a system of energy-consuming technologies? This question calls for a theorization that nuances the idea of podcasting as an ephemeral and intimate medium. This article proposes the term weightless infrastructures in rethinking satellites as atmospheric, free-floating and free-falling technological infrastructures. This notion is abbreviated and used interchangeably with the following terms: weightless technology, weightless hardware and free-floating infrastructure.

Acouscapes is a software designed as a simple educational solution for the creation of soundscapes and their use in the composition of soundscape music in primary and secondary education. The software has slots in which the user must place the sounds that will make up the desired soundscape, allowing them to make different soundwalks by interacting with the graphic interface. Acouscapes allows the content of these soundscapes to be modified by means of sound and structural processing, and includes a recording function. This article aims to present the conceptual and educational foundations of Acouscapes, to describe the software technically and functionally, and to offer some applications of this software as a mediation artefact in educational processes.

During the past decade, embodied knowledge has provided novel important insights to rethink mediation technology, thereby paving the way for a transdisciplinary approach to wearable technologies. Stemming from a phenomenological-based approach and considering current trends in sonic interaction design, this article proposes an extensive account on embodied approaches to mediation technology and underlines the increasing importance of somatic knowledge within the field. It also presents an autoethnographic analysis of my own performance, which provides an original contribution to the artistic application of wearable technologies. Stemming from an ongoing research-creation on musical improvisation with biophysical technologies, the case study emphasises how an embodied and visceral approach to interaction can transform wearable devices into an active sensory-perceptual mode of experiencing, which is capable of stimulating the performer’s sensorimotor metaplasticity. The reconfiguration of a body’s automations through the use of sound feedback is a process that unfolds with a high degree of sensitivity in which the body can be poetically understood as an emergent territoriality, inhabited and transfigured by the sound.

Since the 1980s, deconstruction has become a popular approach for designing architecture. In music, however, the term has not been absorbed as well by the related literature, with a few exceptions. In this article, ways to find ideological groundings for deconstructivism in music are introduced through the concepts of enchaînement and reconstruction paradoxes. Similar to the Banach–Tarski paradox in mathematics, reconstruction paradoxes occur when reconstructing the parts of a whole no longer yields the same properties as the whole. In music, a reconstruction paradox occurs when a piece constructed from tonal segments no longer yields a perceived tonality. Deconstruction in architecture heavily relies on computer-aided design (CAD) to realise complex ideas. Similarly in music, computer-aided composition (CAC) techniques such as neural networks, concatenative synthesis and automated orchestration are used. In this article, we discuss such tools in the context of this advocated new aesthetics: deconstructivist music.

Ryoji Ikeda’s sonic composition has often been considered to prioritise a physical, immersive experience of space over temporal musical progression. This article challenges this commonly held view, arguing that the static nature of his work should be understood in terms of complex interactions between space and time rather than in dualistic terms. By analysing a large-scale sonic transformation within his 2005 album Dataplex, the article uncovers complex rhizomatic networks of materials that expand across multiple tracks. The links between the album tracks leads to an unconventional quality of musical time that contains a high degree of statis yet nevertheless presents a non-linear progression, which is created through repetition (loops), variation and re-contextualisation of sounds. The analysis suggests that experiencing the ordered series of tracks in the album means accumulating information and exploring memory within a non-interchangeable process of sonic flow and metamorphosis. Despite the fragmentary nature of these internal continuities, the resulting rhizomatic networks provide a means to understand and even to listen structurally to Ikeda’s sonic composition.