For the first time, an issue of Organised Sound has been published without a theme. This has been done, not due to the Editors' running out of appropriate ideas, but instead to allow us to publish a number of submitted manuscripts that would have had to be placed in a queue if we had not dedicated one issue to catching up. In fact, the notion of a themeless issue is not completely correct. Of the six articles published in this issue, one falls reasonably well within our recent theme on space (Drever) due to the author's interest in soundscape; another two (Graves/Hand/Hugill and Manning, the issue's Tutorial Article) follow up our last issue's theme concerning image. My own contribution to this issue has been included to initiate a few of the debates associated with our thematic issue 4/3 concerning ‘Breaking the Boundaries’. I am pleased that we have two Student Articles in this issue (Couprie and Drever). The submissions that have no bearing on past or future issue themes are those by Couprie (analysis of electroacoustic music) and Polfreman (music composition software).

This article deals with the analysis of a work by François Bayle, L'oiseau moqueur (1963). I worked at the INA-GRM (Paris) in order to realise a graphic record of the piece using their proprietary acousmograph software. To work from this graphic record, I used three methods of analysis: identification and classification of sound objects using a Schaefferian typology, comparison of objects with one another following a paradigmatic approach, and presentation of the results obtained through enumeration of a certain number of values (duration, density of objects, etc.).

This article describes the design and implementation of MidiVisualiser, a virtual environment which provides an interactive visualisation of MIDI music data. Section 1 explores music visualisation in general and examines the role of computers and virtual environments. Section 2 briefly surveys existing music visualisation research and places MidiVisualiser in context. Section 3 examines various techniques of visualisation and discusses composite dimensions and ‘Benediktine cyberspace’, including a description of how visualisation techniques derived from them were used in MidiVisualiser to overcome some of the difficulties associated with representing large numbers of data attributes simultaneously. Sections 4 and 5 contain an overview of the implementation and evaluation of MidiVisualiser, while section 6 discusses future work and conclusions.

As if the (terrified) Photographer must exert himself to the utmost to keep the Photograph from becoming Death. But I, already an object, I do not fight. (Barthes 1988: 14)

Perhaps this is the ultimate way of playing with reality. (Baudrillard 1997: 38)

Every day the urge grows stronger to get hold of an object at very close range by way of its likeness, its reproduction. (Benjamin 1992: 217)

This paper is born out of my experience as an electroacoustic composer/sound artist and consumer, who passionately engages in the procurance, employment and exchange of soundscape recordings: an ambivalent engagement which is aesthetically rewarding, yet on further reflection deeply unsettling. The aim of this paper is to question and explore why this ostensibly benign and increasingly common procedure (i.e. the routine of soundscape recording/sampling/abstracting, editing, retouching, transforming, mixing, recontextualising . . . ) may result in a durable confrontation with ‘terror’ accompanied by ethical compromise. To articulate a personal and intuitive response, I will refer to critical writings on photography to illuminate sound (i.e. utilising the photograph as a counterpoint to the sonic record). I will be focusing in particular on the recording and the reappropriation of human utterance in electro-acoustic music, as it is probably the most intimate, as well as familiar, sonic material to humans. You cannot escape from your own voice. ‘Soundscape’ denotes ‘any acoustic field of study’ (Schafer 1994: 7); however, in this context I wish to focus on acoustic fields which have a particular social or cultural significance.‘To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed.’ (Sontag 1984: 4) Thus it is appropriated again when employed in sound art.

This paper presents an overview of a generic task model of music composition, developed as part of a research project investigating methods of improving user-interface designs for music software (in particular focusing on sound synthesis tools). The task model has been produced by applying recently developed task analysis techniques to the complex and creative task of music composition. The model itself describes the purely practical aspects of music composition, avoiding any attempt to include the aesthetic motivations and concerns of composers. We go on to illustrate the application of the task model to software design by describing various parts of Modalyser, a graphical user-interface program designed by the author for creating musical sounds with IRCAM's Modalys physical modelling synthesis software. The task model is not yet complete at all levels and requires further refinement, but is deemed to be sufficiently comprehensive to merit presentation here. Although developed for assisting in software design, the task model may be of wider interest to those concerned with the education of music composition and research into music composition generally. This paper has been developed from a short presentation given at the First Sonic Arts Network Conference in January 1998.

This article provides an insight into the history of interactive graphical control interfaces for computer-based and computer-assisted music applications and identifies a number of the challenges which currently face contemporary designers of new software and hardware tools in this context. By studying some of the key features of this rich and varied legacy, it is possible to establish some useful criteria to underpin the development of new and improved tools for manipulating visual representations of music data which can be as diverse as common music notation, acoustic spectra, and all manner of simulations modelling the physical control surfaces associated with devices such as commercial synthesizers and audio mixing consoles.

Both electroacoustic music and its associated musicology are a half century old. Although the number of relevant technological developments during this time could be said to be extremely high, its music has known relatively few heroes, at least within contemporary art music, and written scholarship demonstrates a bias towards formalism and therefore much less of one towards the contextual, aesthetic, reception, etc. The previous sentence implies an imbalance worthy of addressing. This article is less a survey of what exists in the area of electroacoustic music scholarship than one looking into delineating the area and suggesting where the ‘holes in the market’ might be and how they might be filled. Are the fields of sonic art and its musicology intentionally avoiding coherence? And why do musicologists of the music of notes continue to avoid the musicology of the music of sounds? Finally, triangulation, i.e. the use of feedback and evaluation so rarely applied in electroacoustic music(ologogical) contexts, is promoted as a means to greater cohesion and understanding, avoiding what is called an ‘island mentality’ demonstrated by many individuals working in all areas of the sonic arts.