In 2015, Lukas Ligeti created a site-specific, audience-interactive performance work while in residence at the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. Based on interviews with residents of Warsaw, the piece examined aural memories of Jewish life in the city, tracing the extermination and re-emergence of the Jewish community through speech and songs as well as creative musicians’ reimaginings of these memories, with computer technology as a mediator.

Sound artist Joseph Kramer discusses the function of indexical signs when working with magnetic tape and tape loops to elicit a non-symbolic connection to the past. Compositional and technological strategies using custom devices to employ indexical signification are described.

This article presents a series of works for chamber ensemble (incorporating both scored and improvised material), electronics and an installation of long strings. The folto giardino of the title (derived from Mozart/Da Ponte) is a listening, performing environment in which a dramaturgy of relationships, of knowing, hearing, understanding or ignoring, can be played out. Such an approach is offered as a way of thinking about form and material when dealing with the hybrid resources typical of contemporary musical work.

The Piano Mill is a tower in the forest of New South Wales designed and purpose-built to house 16 reclaimed pianos. Architect Bruce Wolfe conceived it as a massive sound sculpture incorporating a steampunk look and nineteenth-century acoustical devices. To launch The Mill the author composed a new work, All’s grist that comes to the mill, that responds to the architecture, the natural environment and Australian colonial heritage.

This short paper will present an overview of two historical data projects developed at the Sensory Computation/Experimental Narrative Environments Lab at Stevens Institute of Technology between 2015–2017. The first project focuses on the sonification of environmental data derived from a ubiquitous sensing network embedded in Tidmarsh Living Observatory in Plymouth, Massachusetts. The second project presented in this short paper explores a history of instrument gesture data as a basis for interactivity in a virtual scene.

The authors describe Aurosion, a performance piece utilizing “the largest feedback loop in the world,” the Internet Audio Cyclotron. Using field recordings, they subvert compression algorithms to explore emergent devolution.

The author describes the manipulation of time and memory in his work LOOP, a tape-based sound installation started in 2004.

A current research project led by the author has collated nearly 2,000 historic electronic music works for the purposes of musicology; nonetheless, this collection is highly amenable to composition. New pieces can be realized by rendering a selected chronology of electronic music history. The context is a wider field of compositional endeavor in “corposition” over large audio databases especially opened up by new research in music information retrieval.

The author discusses recent efforts to archive his personal catalog of live recordings on Digital Audio Tape (DAT) and MiniDisc and the challenges that arise in returning to these once popular, now defunct formats. The materialized history represented by the objects puts pressure on the memories of what they contain.

Modern efforts to preserve and reinterpret canonic musical works in the contemporary piano repertoire often take advantage of new technologies, fundamentally changing core aspects of the works themselves. By approaching preservation as a form of virtualization—in this case the creation of a functional interpretative model of each musical work—artists and researchers can create robust and performable digital versions of important musical systems.