This introductory article defines somatic music/ology as music that emphasises and reflects on its embodied nature and an associated theoretical discourse that addresses this aspect. It further traces the genealogy of this concept to the convergence of different intellectual and artistic currents from the mid twentieth century, including the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ecological psychology associated with James J. Gibson, performance- and body-oriented musicology represented by Roland Barthes and Carolyn Abbate and later developments such as 4E cognition as well as the experimental music theatre emerging from the 1960s. Finally, it introduces the various contributions to the issue.

Sonic Bothy is an inclusive experimental and new-music organisation with an ensemble of musicians with and without disabilities and neurodiversities. This article considers their audiovisual piece Verbaaaaatim (2020–21), its form marked by the context of its development and composition during the COVID-19 pandemic, using a set of interlayered perspectives that mirror the formal layers of the piece. Recorded in a single take, it comprises instrumental sounds, spoken words, written words, static and dynamic graphics and videos of the performers, aligned so that the piece seems consistently to flow onwards, although it is not always clear which element impels its forward motion. The article considers, in particular, Verbaaaaatim's presentation of modes of embodied conviviality between its performers, the ways these find resonance in wider histories of experimental music and the ways in which its elements can be understood in an ecological framework as ‘sound actions’.

In this collaborative account of Iddon's Sapindales, the authors recount how their experiences of live and virtual clarinet sounds and environmental sounds combine in varied ways. By focusing on relationships among sonic layers, the authors emphasise the dynamic interplay of live and recorded performance, music and environment, the real and the virtual, the abstract and the concrete. Each relationship involves mediation and ambiguity, with elements that alternatively split apart or join together. The listening outcomes that we describe repeatedly highlight a positional swing between subject and object, as the authors reach across explanatory modes, drawing on phenomenology, musicology, psychoanalysis and ecological psychology, among others. We aim to capture the process of aesthetic listening, a process that is live, interactive, constructive, imaginative.

Some musics and musical situations seem to invite the audience to participate; others insist that the audience should absorb the events of performance in rapt attention. A slippage between such distinctions can also arise: a moment where an audience might be uncertain as to whether joining in is desired or welcome. In an examination of such a moment of uncertainty or surprise, at the close of Raymond MacDonald's Stolen in a Dreamland Heist (2021), we suggest that such events point towards and perform the particular creative spaces and spacing effects that arise in musical events in ways which draw attention to the affective bodily relationships between performers and auditors. The article takes the form of its own nested dialogue: an interview with the composer forms its central portion, framed within theoretical examination both of that critical moment within performance and the reflections on it the interview reveals.

This article presents an exomusicologically informed response to the theme of alienation through encounter in Oli Jan's Three Singers on Planet M, in which actors execute apparently ritualistic sounds and actions. Their activities signal aesthetic intentionality but do so through an unfamiliar cultural display that defies the rules of our own lived experience of embodiment and environment. The conceit sets up an interesting question related to the somatic imaginary: how can and how do we relate to the imagination of non-human bodies?

Björn Heile's 3 × 10 Musical Actions for Three Socially Distanced Performers features frequent changes in musical material, playing style and instrumental combinations. Throughout a series of short sections, the performers play, sing, speak, conduct and move around, following instructions that appear on tablets. This article reflects on audiences’ experiences of the work and on musical actions more generally. We consider musical actions as short, coherent motion chunks and distinguish between several types of action that appear in the piece: gestures (communicative actions, with or without sound), reactions (where a player responds to another) and interactions (where players mutually coordinate). The musicians’ individual and collective actions create a sense of play: on the one hand, they seem free and depart from standard concert conventions; on the other hand, they seem to be following a set of rules, even if these rules are not explained to the audience. As such, we approach the piece via theories of play and relate it to earlier modernist musical games. Ultimately, 3 × 10 Musical Actions emphasises several aspects of musical actions, as social, functional, expressive, playful and embodied.

This article presents the theoretical foundations of speculative archaeoacoustics, a methodology of composition in which artistic practice becomes a way of accessing the lost music of the Upper Palaeolithic. It begins by accepting David Graeber and David Wengrow’s understanding of prehistory as a dazzling tapestry of investigations and enquiries, before drawing a methodology of affect and creation from the work of Steven Mithen. From here it critiques two contemporary procedures for realising ancient music – one theoretical and one practical – to show how lost art must be reclaimed not through the empirical limit but the aesthetic exception. By adapting Alain Badiou's theory of eternal, invariant truths through a satirical tradition that includes science- and theory-fiction, the argument concludes with the demonstration of a procedure through which we may reimagine, discover and speak for vanished genius.