Taking an epistemological stance towards music in a real-time listening situation entails a definition of music as a temporal and sounding art. This means that music cannot be described in abstract and detached terms as something “out there” in a virtual space but rather as something that impinges upon our senses in an actual “here and now.” Musical sense-making, therefore, should be considered a kind of ongoing knowledge construction with a dynamic tension between actual sensation and mental representation of sounding events.

Music Gesture can be thought of as being made up of dynamic, multisensorial lines. From this, the author draws from Ingold’s “correspondence of lines” as a conception of music and a transformative compositional process, informing gestural line expressions and the development of notation systems for the body. The author outlines the technology he has developed for two compositions, involving a video scoring methodology and software that enables interactive video gestural sampling in a collaborative art music context.

Study in three phases is an adaptive site-specific sound installation that includes 22 solenoids placed on metallic arches that surround visitors and react to environmental perturbations, creating a self-regulating soundscape of metallic hits that serves to renew the visitors’ acoustic perspective. Adaptivity is a crucial aspect of the work: Similar perturbations will not generally cause similar reactions from the installation based on past interactions, thus allowing evolution over time to play a key role artistically and technically.

The abstraction of musical structures as mathematical objects in a geometrical space is one of the major accomplishments of contemporary music theory. The author generalizes the concept of musical spaces as networks and derives compositional design principles via network topology analysis. This approach provides a framework for analysis and quantification of similarity of musical objects and structures and suggests a way to relate such measures to human perception of different musical entities.

The author discusses her approach in conceiving The Whole Inside, a generative sound mural combining artificial and human voices. Using nine Visaton speakers, Pure Data and data projection, the author confronts femininity and violent misogyny, by which the body is being depersonalized, leading to subsequent dissociation as a defense mechanism to cope with traumatic events. The work is based on a graphically violent text sourced from the incels.me (“involuntary celibates”) forum.

De Rerum Natura is an electroacoustic composition by the author, based on field recordings from the Brazilian Amazon rainforest. The piece is part of wider research from the author that explores the act of listening, associated visual mental imagery and dynamic subjective links between the composer’s experience of listening to/recording experience of the original material and the audience’s perception of the final composition as it is performed. This article focuses on the author’s process of developing De Rerum Natura, based on Deep Listening.

In the past decade, a growing music-analytic practice has emerged around timbre, a parameter long considered either irrelevant to musical structure or too unwieldy to tackle. This new practice centers on an understanding of timbre as a perceptual rather than physical (acoustical) attribute and privileges timbre as a bearer of musical meaning.

The Beat Machine is a handheld music synthesizer and sequencer. The authors discuss the development of the Beat Machine and how creative constraints and opportunities were introduced by the particularities of low-cost microprocessors and associated electronics. The discussion is framed as an exemplar of Kåre Poulsgaard’s concept of enactive individuation, a framework for relating material engagement to digital design and fabrication.