This article explores the similarities and differences between live coding and traditional music performances. The focus is on how bodily movements are expressed and whether pre-reflective processes may be activated during a live coding performance. While reports from practitioners vary on percepts of embodiment, the community is missing a theoretical background that reflects on practice. Understanding pre-reflective processes in live coding can benefit performance practices and tool development. As a live coder, I reflect on personal experiences and explore what I call ‘interactivity variations’, a term to denote different gestural manners of interactions during a performance. I observe patterns of embodiment among various live coders who use diverse performance systems from online videos. Out of 11 examples of performance systems, two cases demonstrate interactivity variations that can activate pre-reflective processes while another exploits direct manipulation. I present some implications for the patterns of bodily movement during a live coding performance and discuss how descriptive and prescriptive notation can be important and potentially influence our sensorimotor network. The article contributes a first account of a sensorimotor theory on live coding performances, reflecting on practice and embodied music cognition by presenting an aesthetic analysis of 11 online video examples.

Braiding sound–listening–learning (encouraged by composer Pauline Oliveros) with critical consciousness (inspired by educator Paulo Freire), the authors led a location-specific, socially engaged sound art project in Rhode Island (USA). The authors describe a style of socially engaged sound art that approaches the object of art as a dialogic process of learning.

Through an ecological approach to creative practice (henceforth ecomprovisation), this project deals with the expansion of creative strategies applicable to everyday contexts. Within ubiquitous music (ubimus), we target the convergence of sonification methods with the application of ecological models within the context of comprovisation. These conceptual frameworks inform the technological and aesthetic approaches applied in the making of Markarian 335. We describe the creative procedures and the implications of the design choices involved in this artwork. The contributions and shortcomings of our ecomprovisational approach are situated within the context of the current efforts to foster expanded creative possibilities in ubimus endeavours.

This article explores strategies that allow electronic music performers to engage their audiences and environments in live acts of co-creation. We outline our existing musical practice relying on site-specific sampling and digital mobile technologies that have been tested across a range of participatory music performances. Salient challenges within this performance context are identified and several tools and techniques are proposed as solutions. We then consider how setting-based and sample-based participatory performances can be expanded through gamification strategies. After exploring how notions of playful experience can offer new insights into the nature of audience engagement, we propose several approaches for introducing gamified elements into performative music practices that can expand the scope of audience participation while preserving key aspects of using concert location recordings and musical improvisation. We conclude by discussing the implications of these approaches for the performer–audience relationship and the prospect of musical engagement with the environment before suggesting directions for future research.

In this article we discuss and critically analyse some colonial assumptions of live coding from the Global North in contrast to the practice of live coding in Latin America (LATAM). To do so, we first look at different colonial problems that arise from different contemporary approaches. This results in a recommendation to consider more complex conditions of power that exist in the Global South and shows how live coding can put into practice greater complexity in the social system of art that could contribute to the structural reinforcement of the next society, as well as a critique of the inherited tonality in different media. We then proceed to criticise other sound colonial assumptions by using the decolonial praxis-theory from LATAM live coders and propose different forms of sound decolonisation. Finally, we propose a way to reconcile the convergence of interests between live coding in Latin America, the ‘methodology’ of Black studies, and the ‘theory’ of sonic fiction. In the conclusion, we pose several critical questions that could serve as the basis for further investigations.

This article explores the distribution of creative agency between artists and audiences in participatory sound art through the lens of perspective theory. In contemporary creativity studies, perspective is taken to mean the way in which an actor’s perception of the environment is structured by their intention to act. According to Vlad Glaveanu, constructing and taking new perspectives constitutes a necessary condition for creative acts as it reveals new affordances of the creator’s materials. In this article, I investigate the perspectives of sound artists and participants through ethnographic case studies of Katrine Faber’s participatory performance Let Us Sing Your Place and Benoît Maubrey’s interactive Speaker Sculptures. In Faber’s performance, the participants use their voices to recreate the soundscape of a place described by one of them. Maubrey’s sculptures are large structures built out of loudspeakers through which the participants can play their own sounds via Bluetooth, phone lines or directly plugged-in microphone. Analysing ethnographic observations and interviews with artists and participants in the two case studies, I discuss how their perspectives are constructed and communicated through artwork’s materialities. Exploring the particularity of perspectives induced by participatory sound art, I show how it challenges a number of conventional ideas about sound and auditory culture.

Live coding in Latin America has always been tied to educational access concerns and has been disseminated through the region by way of free workshops offered outside of academic institutions. Although there is significant live coding activity in Latin America, live coding outside of the European context has been little explored. We interviewed 11 female practitioners active in live coding nodes in Latin America to uncover the challenges this group faces in terms of access to music education and live coding with the aim of determining what strategies can be implemented to mitigate these challenges and promote diversity in the future. We also consider the role of collective activity and how interaction between live coding nodes in the region has led to the formation of safe spaces in which participants can share resources. The results show that live coding offers attractions for those who have faced challenges in music academia while those with non-music backgrounds found an introduction to sound creation through live coding. This suggests that live coding provides new opportunities for inclusiveness that could be taken advantage of by music academics.

This article aims to explore the concept of patched/versioned musical works as creative ecologies. It identifies how the internet’s involvement in music creation and dissemination influences choices related to the release of such works. Throughout this writing, the author looks at the increasingly volatile structures surrounding recorded music in the early twenty-first century as a result of streaming platforms such as Spotify and video-based social media sites such as TikTok becoming the primary means for music consumption. It explores this volatility as a method for approaching the release of new music within dynamic musical ecosystems and looks at the growing art scene focusing on this way of working, drawing parallels between artistry and subscription-based services where content continually evolves over time.

This article reports on an interview-based study with ten sound artists and composers, all engaged in situated sonic practices. We propose that these artists engage the ear and shape possible interactions with the artwork by altering the relationship between sound, the space in which it is heard and the people who hear it. Our interviews probe the creative process and explore how a sound artist’s methods and tools might influence the reception of their work. A thematic analysis of interview transcriptions leads us to characterise artist processes as mediatory, in the sense that they act in between site and audience experience and are guided by the non-human agencies of settings and material things. We propose that artists transfer their own situated and embodied listening to that of the audience and develop sonic and staging devices to direct perceptual activity and listening attention. Our findings also highlight a number of engagement challenges, in particular the difficulty artists face in understanding their audience’s experience and the specificity of an artwork’s effect not just to its location but also to the disposition, abilities and prior experiences of listeners.

This article examines the creative practice of Algorave music in Indonesia, with a focus on the Paguyuban Algorave community based in Yogyakarta. The Algorave movement, which has gained international recognition in recent years, has been observed to amalgamate with local culture, which created a unique musical approach. The research presented in this article delves into the distinctive musical approach of the Paguyuban Algorave community and aims to understand the reasons for its widespread acceptance compared with other forms of computer-aided music. The article also explores the future direction of the Algorave movement in Indonesia, considering the antecedents of Indonesian contemporary music that have contributed to its development in the country. Furthermore, this study investigates the influence of communal and hereditary factors on the community’s interactions, communication and knowledge-sharing.

This article sketches a theoretical framework that allows the conceptual inclusion of non-human animals and artificial intelligences in human sonic collaborations. Post-humanist concepts that question the categorical divide between nature and culture, following Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour, converge with contemporary, non-adaptationist evolutionary aesthetics. Therefore, the anthropocentric ‘othering’ of non-humans gives way to a concept of a more-than-human sociality of sound. We offer some theoretical propositions for the extension of socially engaged sound practices to collaborations between humans and non-human animals and between humans and artificial intelligences, and then exemplify such multispecies sonic collaborations by analysing some existing projects from the fields of sound art and musical performance. After drawing some more general conclusions from these analyses, we hint at potential aesthetical and ethical parallels between animal and AI creative agency. Finally, we point out a few questions we see as important for future advanced settings of such collaborations, especially when it comes to assemblages of different AI technologies and to future concepts of animal–computer interaction that might enable non-human animals and artificial intelligence to cooperate creatively.

Examining the role of arts and culture in regional Australia often focuses on economic aspects within the creative industries. However, this perspective tends to disregard the value of unconventional practices and fails to recognise the influence of regional ecological settings and the well-being advantages experienced by amateur and hobbyist musicians who explore ubiquitous methods of music creation. This article presents the results of a survey conducted among practitioners in regional Australia, exploring their utilisation of creative technology ecosystems. This project marks the first independent, evidence-based study of experimental electronic music practices in regional Australia and how local and digital resource ecosystems support those activities. Spanning the years 2021 and 2022, the study involved interviewing 11 participants from many Australian states. In this article, we share the study’s findings, outlining the diverse range of experimental electronic music practices taking place across regional Australia and how practitioners navigate the opportunities and challenges presented by their local context.

This article is a text on the encounter of live coding with soundscape, soundart installation and soundwalking. This combination involves leaving the studio or a stage for live coding outside or moving to a participatory event inside a gallery, as in the case of an art installation. The article presents four cases of live coders and artists who have worked with this mixture. To understand how these artists combine live coding with these sound practices, I interviewed them and observed their works and performances in videos posted on internet platforms. The article shows that live coding sound, commonly performed within a concert space, can happen in listening, participation or walking contexts. The cases explore the sound of nature and the city to integrate it into the live coding practice of each artist. This shows that live coding can be expanded, combined or hybridised with other sound practices and establish a dialogue between different communities.

This article describes the ways in which the spectra of electroacoustic music compositions can be structured coherently. It begins by describing the straightjacket that composers and listeners are constrained by when using the concept of ‘source bonding’ and how this needs to be discarded for effective listening. It then describes the concept of spectral merging and how ideas of musical timbre are formed, and finally discusses the many ways that spectra can be structured with both harmonic and inharmonic components. Examples are given from the author’s own music and other well-known works in the literature of electroacoustic music.

This article considers some of the potential advantages that creators without formal training – Barthes’s ‘amateurs’ – have employed in collaborative processes to make sound art and also considers ways in which the approach may open fresh forms of social engagement. Drawing on the author’s collaborative practice in sound creation, Maria Lind’s classification of types of collaboration is extended to develop the notion of a ‘quadruple’ variant. This is based on the relationship between human and non-human collaborators. The role of the ‘Trickster’ is developed as a means of supporting and facilitating amateurs operating in a radical context. I propose, and provide a manifesto for, a category of the ‘New Amateur’ who addresses social engagement in sound practices in at least two ways. First, via structural dependence on a notion of collaboration significantly expanded to include not only other humans but also materials, ideas and both non- and post-human entities. Second, by drawing upon the anarchist ethics and concepts of the Trickster to democratise artistic potential through collaborative and distributed authorship. Thus, the manifesto reflects a political dimension rooted in the everyday and reveals a route to social engagement via personal creative awakening. The New Amateur offers fresh possibilities in music and organised sound and engages via an unleashing of individual capability to mirror the ‘lines of flight’ pursued by John Cage, La Monte Young and Alan Kaprow. The mechanism initiated in this way locates individual creativity in the context of mutual aid. Social engagement is driven by individual creativity and the explosive awareness of the potential this awakens.

Bringing together an array of interdisciplinary subjects, this article seeks to proffer a theory of political aesthetic preference emergent within participatory musical works. Beginning with an overview of imitation in music and then recapping the critical work advanced by Kofi Agawu and Jean-Jacques Nattiez on musical semiology, this article first delves into how musical signs are interpreted and propagated within participatory settings. Subsequently, using Jürgen Habermas’s influential theory on the public sphere as well as the critical revisions to said theory proposed by Nancy Fraser and Michael Warner, participatory musics are conceptualised as constituting the formal space of a public in which the aesthetic direction of a participatory music work is negotiated among participants. Based on an analysis of Luke Dahl, Jorge Herrera and Carr Wilkerson’s multi-user instrument and participatory work TweetDreams, this article discusses the ways in which participant inputs and choices impact the poietic process of the work due to the clear rules that are set up within its interactive and algorithmic protocols for sonification. It concludes by pointing towards other recent research on participatory works, where the framing of participatory musics as a political–aesthetic space leads to broader questions about audience power and how the latter is negotiated and shared, then poses questions for future research on the audience’s choice in refusal and dissensus.

This article introduces the history and aesthetics of feedback-based music, from early practitioners to more advanced methods and state-of-the-art works based on adaptation. Some of the most relevant techniques developed over almost six decades of investigations in the area of recursive systems for electronic music are discussed to show the variety and richness that a single specialised domain can have, providing examples of how scientific and philosophical principles can be translated into music. The historical context is key to understanding the evolution of the field: feedback-based music arose during the same years in which cybernetics, together with other disciplines, were experiencing a profound transformation. I will provide an overview of how such disciplines changed, highlighting the connections between seemingly distant areas such as philosophy, biology and engineering, and the fact that the development of feedback-based music appears to have followed somewhat closely the evolution of systems thinking. Finally, the article explores questions of musical aesthetics and music theory related to the use of complex autonomous systems in live performance through observations on the author’s creative practice.