Abstract Coupled audiovisual instruments, in which sound and image are produced from a shared generative process, promise media equality by design. But does causal coupling actually deliver perceptual parity? This article asks how composers experience media equality and intermedial interference when working with such an instrument. We report a practice-based study of the Cellular Au-Tonnetz, a system in which audio and LED light are parallel projections of the same evolving cellular-automaton state. Nine participants composed short pieces under three modality conditions: visual-only, audio-only and audiovisual. Each was followed by replay with both modalities revealed. By withholding one medium during composition and reinstating it at replay, the protocol makes the construction of audiovisual experience observable. Audiovisual access was preferred overall (eight of nine participants), but the audio-only condition most often produced the largest perceived mismatch (six of nine), and replay frequently turned apparent mismatch into coherent re-reading. Mismatch typically took the form of cue conflict: temporal persistence, density correspondence and perceptual masking. Productive interference emerged at replay through rebinding. We position this as foundational practice-based work, offering a method other practitioners can adopt, and design priorities for instruments where sound and image share a single generative substrate.
The article examines the artistic project Esploratori dell'Infinito as a paradigmatic case of intermedial theatre grounded in a research-through-practice methodology, in which sound, music, voice, text and scenic space operate on an equal ontological and functional footing. Rather than a narrative transposition or the layering of heterogeneous media onto a pre-existing dramaturgical framework, the work is conceived as a perceptual device whose dramaturgy arises from the dynamic interplay of multiple semiotic systems.Central to the analysis is the role of sound and music, not as a decorative or illustrative layer but as autonomous dramaturgical material capable of producing space, meaning and imagination. Drawing on practices of musique concr & egrave;te, soundscape composition, electroacoustic processing and the live performance of acousmatic music, the project fosters an embodied listening that transforms the spectator into a co-author of the performative event. The article situates this process within current theories of intermedial adaptation, listening modes and sonic spaces, arguing that Esploratori dell'Infinito advances a counter-model to linear production logics and proposes an operative framework for genuinely integrated sonic dramaturgy.
Abstract This article is approached from an experimental perspective, attempting to more closely align the author’s compositional and critical practice by writing through ideas ‘live’ on the page as opposed to fully structuring thought in advance. It considers audiovisual composition as an intermedia art form, asking what the term really means for audiovisual composition as both a compositional practice and a perceptual experience, and considering the usefulness of framing the broader field of audiovisual composition as an intermedial one. It reflects on the author’s compositional process, offering some description and discussion of the intuitive elements of this and how they are manifest, and offers a conceptual framework for understanding the act of composing audiovisually, through offering the term transconception as a partner term to transperception , a concept put forward in the author’s previous writing. Ultimately, it reflects on audiovisual composition both as a field and as a category of artwork, asking whether it is now sufficiently well understood to be considered a standalone art form with its own conceptual frameworks and terminologies.
Data-embedded instruments that couple sensing, modelling and sound production are increasingly used in electroacoustic practice, yet their ethical and cultural configurations remain under-analysed. This article develops an ethical-embodied framework for examining how particular data, sensing and mapping arrangements configure relations of care, listening and musical agency. Drawing on feminist and decolonial listening practices, disability and critical data studies and accounts of embodied instrumentality, it combines a selective genealogy of electroacoustic and globally situated practices with a mid-level comparative lens that treats its technical axes as heuristic rather than taxonomic. Case vignettes analyse works using gesture tracking, electromyography (EMG) and brain–computer interfaces (BCI), audience-sensing installations and machine-learning vocal systems, alongside the author’s own data-embedded instrument. Across these examples, the analysis shows how similar technologies can reproduce or contest institutional surveillance, extractivism and aesthetic normativity and outlines implications for the design, evaluation and teaching of data-mediated musical systems foregrounding situated listening and collective accountability.
Speculative xenomusicology explores alternative music theories, imagining the physical and cognitive affordances of alien musical life. Exoplanets are actively studied in astronomy, and though there is no direct evidence of xenobiology, particularly of more advanced musical intelligences, potential alien music may still be considered in advance in the same way that exobiologists speculate on the conditions for alien life. In particular, a generative system is presented which creates imagined xenomusic based on altering human memory constraints and links the organisation of the sound to the parallel generation of an alien language. Microtonal pitch, complex rhythm, timbral material and spatialisation within putative alien architectures are all considered. This alien ‘analysis by synthesis’ can provide new musical adventures and new understanding of the possibilities of music theoretical space, regardless of any eventual ontological resolution of xenocultures.
This article proposes a framework for considering recorded sounds in electroacoustic music, focusing specifically on their physical connection to real-world sources. This is achieved through an intermedial model, whereby ontological discussions from the field of photography are transposed to the sonic arts. It analyses the concepts of indexicality and the trace - fundamental to the writings of photographic theorists including Bazin, Barthes and Gunning - and applies them to the medium of recorded sound. The discussion establishes a means of considering source sounds primarily based on physical causality rather than resemblance and metaphor. By framing the recording process as a direct indexical link to the source equivalent to the photographic image, the article offers a novel way to analyse and compose abstract electroacoustic works that retain a tangible connection to reality.
In this article, Composing for Acoustic Robots (COMACROB) serves as a case study on the posthuman ontology of digital instruments. COMACROB is an instrumental system composed of live coding, AI-generated symbolic music and mechanically actuated acoustic instruments, such as the Yamaha Disklavier and MIDI pipe organ. The system challenges traditional distinctions between instrument, scoring and performance. The study borrows key notions from Thor Magnusson's organology theory, presenting COMACROB as a layered system of inscriptions. It then attempts to delineate COMACROB's speculative realism, drawing on Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) as two complementary theoretical frameworks. ANT is employed to present how agency in COMACROB is distributed across a network of translating actions between human and nonhuman agents, whereas OOO places the focus of inquiry on the autonomy and resistance of the objects that constitute the system. At the core of the study lies the notion that algorithmic processes are not external control agents, but intrinsic functions that co-constitute the identity of the instrument. The article overall posits that COMACROB is a case of posthuman model of musical organology, according to which digital instruments are participant agents in the process of music authorship.
The text explores 'Black Box Music,' an artistic research experiment investigating human-technology relations in musical improvisation. The authors describe performances in which each musician plays an unfamiliar, complex, custom-built instrument designed by another team member. These 'black box' devices - ranging from AI-based systems to assemblages of analogue devices - cannot be fully understood or controlled, thus foregrounding questions of agency, sense-making, and aesthetic experience. Drawing on Actor-Network Theory, phenomenology, and philosophies of technology, the authors show how performers, instruments, and audience form a dynamic network of actants whose roles and intentions remain ambiguous. Players initially struggle to 'read' the instruments' behaviour, shifting from reactive analysis toward proactive improvisation. This process blurs embodiment and alterity: the instruments alternately function as transparent extensions of the body and as quasi-autonomous others. Such ambiguity invites anthropomorphisation and even ritualised interaction, echoing historical entanglements of music, magic, and spirituality. Audience members, too, encounter indeterminate agency and must negotiate aesthetic meaning without clear attribution of sound to human or machine. The project demonstrates how complexity and unpredictability destabilise traditional notions of control, revealing improvisation as collective, participatory sense-making and highlighting the emergent, co-creative agency of both humans and technological instruments.
This paper presents a theoretical framework for analysing sound design in robotic performance from a scenographic perspective. Whilst robotic performers are increasingly visible in contemporary art venues, from gallery installations to theatre stages, the role of sound as a scenographic and dramaturgical element remains under-theorised. Existing scholarship addresses visual, kinetic and interactive aspects of robotic performance, yet sound's fundamental function in shaping robotic presence, agency, and affect has received limited systematic study. This is significant because sound fundamentally alters the ontology of robotic performance: a silent industrial arm appears as a mere mechanical device, but the same arm with synthesised breathing sounds or melodic tones becomes reminiscent of a character or agent. Drawing on documented works including Mimus, Inferno, Alter 3, and The Blind Robot, along with theories from sound studies, scenography, posthuman performance, and human-robot interaction research, this paper identifies four overlapping heuristic strategies: mechanical mimicry, contrapuntal composition, procedural soundscapes, and voice synthesis. By positioning sound as scenography rather than simple accompaniment, this framework advances scenographic theory into technological performance contexts, raises critical questions about anthropomorphic design and voice ethics and integrates recent HRI empirical findings to ground its claims and direct future audience-based testing.
The contemporary listening environment is characterised by extensive mediation, in which environmental recordings are continually detached from their original contexts and reconfigured elsewhere. Earlier soundscape research used the term schizophonia to describe the separation of sound from its source and the consequent result of a disembodied and unsettling sonic experience. However, this framing has come under growing criticism for regarding mediation as a defect. This article proposes an alternative concept, 'mediated auditory dislocation', to describe an analytically non-normative condition in which environmental sounds are recorded, displaced from their original time and place, and re-embedded within new audiovisual and interactive settings. The argument is developed through a practice-based case study of Shifting Horizons (Bai 2025), an interactive VR audiovisual soundscape work. The case study shows how control over sonic layering, electroacoustic processing, and audiovisual coupling allows listeners to reconfigure the relation between recorded sound and its mediated presentation, making mediation itself available for comparative and reflexive listening. The article concludes by introducing a three-layer collaborative media model that clarifies how VR can support comparative and reflexive listening through parameterised layer control. The model is proposed as a transferable analytic heuristic, intended to be tested and refined across further VR soundscape works.
In a non-generative approach to artificial intelligence in an artistic practice, this work looks at mapping processing data from artificial neural networks (NNs) onto sound and visuals. One aim of this practice-based piece of research is to paradoxically offer insights into how these ubiquitous, yet notoriously opaque algorithms operate, by exposing the audience to the intrinsic unintelligibility of their processes. The other is to use these vast amounts of abstract data as a creative starting point for audiovisual artworks, referring to aesthetic traditions that have emerged from the need to make use and potentially make sense of such extensive masses of information, and from ones that have developed sounds that have gradually become associated with digital and post-digital worlds and other exterior and abstract concepts. At the heart of the whole work is a link and cross-fertilisation between the use of sounds and visuals aesthetically associated with errors and digital malfunction and the use of actual 'waste' data (from NN training), which acts as a trace of their operation.
This article examines how algorithms are embedded in contemporary instrumental and electroacoustic practice, focusing on orchestration tools and AI-improvisation environments such as Orchidea and Somax2. Its central claim is that artificial intelligence in these systems extends spectralist compositional tendencies into new computational and performative contexts. Historically, instrumental resynthesis recreated analysed spectra through vocal-instrumental, or electronic means; today, AI-based frameworks broaden this logic, opening new aesthetics and modes of interaction. In both systems, spectral analysis underpins the segmentation, combination and transformation of sound within corpus-based synthesis. Orchidea maps spectral targets onto instrumental resources through forecasting and optimisation, enabling new approaches to orchestral design. Somax2 navigates its corpus in real time through multi-agent interaction with human performers, reframing improvisation as a dynamic feedback loop.
This article investigates multisensory listening, ecological approaches and embodiment in videomusic and audiovisual performance. Rooted in practice-based research, autoethnography and phenomenology, it explores how interactions between sound, image, bodies and intersubjective encounters within the triad of space, place and environment condition transmodal perception. The study identifies scenophony, affect and imagination as constitutive vectors of immersion, highlighting the porosity between physical sites and virtual environments where sensory boundaries dissolve. Synchresis is analysed as a primary mechanism of audiovisual transmodality, while the process of habitation facilitates the transformation of the technical dispositif into a lived place. Texture is established as a foundational compositional principle to organise sensory experience, using the analysis of Nu & eacute;es (2016) to demonstrate how these dynamics operate through perceptual deviation and transmodal textures in motion. This research defines audiovisual creation as an ecological practice shaped through fluidity, intersubjectivity and situated modes of inhabiting space.
Abstract Interest is growing in how relational ontologies and more-than-human design methodologies – so-called ‘entanglement’ theories – might inform digital music research. To what extent does the growing popularity of such theories portend a change in technical or musical practices versus putting new gloss on long-standing ideas? Can or should entanglement theories be distilled into concrete design frameworks? This paper starts from the opposite premise: rather than offering an unambiguous roadmap for designers, entanglement theories are at their most powerful in destabilising ideas and worldviews that have become so ingrained as to become invisible. In digital musical instrument (DMI) design, this barely visible infrastructure consists partly of an ecosystem of stable, context-agnostic concepts about music: analytical descriptors such as notes, pitches, onsets and gestures which get inverted into the building blocks of sound-producing technical systems. However, design is not as simple as inverted analysis. This paper argues that treating familiar musical concepts as authoritative is responsible for several long-standing conundrums facing DMI research. The paper juxtaposes ideas from entanglement literature with brief vignettes concerning instruments new and old, arguing that musical instruments enact the very concepts they take as pre-existing, and that everything about musical discourse and practice should remain up for grabs.
The development of computing in Brazil followed a peculiar path, shaping cultural production since the earliest encounters between artists and technology. Beginning in the 1960s, musicians and computer scientists made initial attempts to use computers for artistic purposes, at a time when it was still possible to keep pace with developments in Computer Music in North America and Europe. However, restricted access to foreign technologies and the political context following the 1964 military coup-two deeply interrelated factors-made it unfeasible to establish a national system capable of sustaining continuous production in Music & Computing before the early 1990s. Such development would have required both strong institutional support and freedom of artistic expression, conditions that were not present. This article traces these trajectories through key artistic experiments and public policies related to computing. Rather than offering a comprehensive catalogue, it presents a transversal perspective that highlights the relationship between the formation of the Computer Music field and state policies up to the mid-1980s. By interweaving these parallel narratives-linking cultural practices and political frameworks-the study sheds light on how computer-mediated artistic production contributed to the constitution of Electronic Music in Brazil.
