ABSTRACT The author played clarinet in accompaniment with a singing male humpback whale off the coast of Maui. A sound spectrogram suggests that the whale may have altered his song in response to the clarinet. This observation is consistent with the fact that humpback whales rapidly change their song during breeding season from week to week. A male humpback whale may be able to quickly match new pitched, musical sounds it has never heard before—a result different from those of most humpback whale playback experiments. This experiment suggests that interspecies music-making might be a valuable tool in helping understand the complex communication strategies of humpback whales, as well as in extending our own music making beyond the human realm.

ABSTRACT The author describes an Internet-based audio composition and diffusion system, Eavesdropping (2007–2008), designed for public spaces where several computer users are gathered, such as cafés. Compositions are created from abstract mood objects rather than musical structures. A composer uploads a set of audio files to represent the different moods in the composition. During a performance, a server-based Conductor selects audio files from this set to be played at each participant's laptop based on the composition, the number of participants in the room and the time they joined the performance. This project aims to enhance awareness of and connectedness among individual members of an audience at a generative musical performance by encouraging shared experiences.

ABSTRACT While technological developments can replace some aspects of live performance, they have also opened a new dimension of musical structure: that of liveness and mediation, which requires live performance in order to be meaningful. Liveness itself can be used and manipulated as a distinct musical element. The author describes these concepts at work in his compositions that explore mediatization as a device of intermedial imitative counterpoint and formal structure.

ABSTRACT This article examines Canadian pianist Glenn Gould's turn from performance to the recording studio as a means to realize music's utopian potential. What emerged from these post-performance years was a deep ambivalence engendered by the studio itself: a distinctly compelling vision of the studio as a monastic retreat, a site of total control in music and a technology of self-erasure.

ABSTRACT Musical tuning systems are found in intriguing diversity in human cultures around the world and over the history of human music-making. Traditional justifications for the adoption of such musical systems consider tuning an algorithmic optimization of consonance. However, it is unclear how this can be implemented in a realistic evolutionary process, with no central entity in charge of optimization. Inspired by the methodology of artificial language evolution, the author proposes that tuning systems can emerge as the result of local musical interactions in a population. His computer simulations show that such interactional mechanisms are capable of generating coherent artificial tunings that resemble natural systems, sometimes with a diversity and complexity unaccounted for by previous theoretical justifications.

ABSTRACT Acousmatic sound art production has as its goal a transformation of recognizable recorded sound samples into new relations, effectively hiding the origin of the raw material so as to focus on an experience of pure sound. The author defines the “live” as the “life” from which these samples are pulled, and considers the ways in which the biography of the sample troubles acousmatic art.

ABSTRACT A memnonium is a self-actuating system that generates music using solar energy. The name comes from the statue of Memnon, a famous tourist attraction in the Greco-Roman world that was said to emit sound when warmed by the morning sun. The Memnon statue inspired the design of musical automata in later periods, to which there are many historical references. Several intriguing technologies and engineering methods may be well suited for modern memnonium design efforts. However, full realization of solar thermoacoustic and thermokinetic sculpture would likely require deep collaboration between physics, music and other disciplines. In modern times, only a few simple proof-of-concept memnonia have been constructed.

ABSTRACT Working from a phenomenological position, the author investigates “in-head” acoustic localization in the context of the historical development of modern listening. Starting from the development of the stethoscope in the early 19th century, he traces novel techniques for generating space within the body and extrapolates from them into contemporary uses of headphones in sound art. The first half of the essay explores the history, techniques and technology of “in-head” acoustics; the second half presents three sound artists who creatively generate headphone spatializations. The essay ends with reflections on how these sound “imaging” techniques topologically shape our subjectivities.

ABSTRACT This paper details compositional approaches in music for cyberinstruments by means of physical modeling synthesis. Although the focus is on compositions written with the models simulated by the digital waveguides, modal synthesis and mass-spring-damper algorithms, music written with other modeling techniques is also reviewed.