In this paper I describe a work of mine, Background Noise Study, as a starting point to raise questions of broader relevance for current artistic practices. Issues are presented in terms varying from technical and specific, to more philosophical and general (system-theory, biocybernetics, ecology). Excursions are made into the music-theoretical (understanding of key issues in the sound arts, such as ‘space’, ‘performance’, ‘form’ or ‘timbre’) and the political (politics of sound, biopolitics of performance and listening).

Nature sound recording has long been criticised for the artifice of the documents it produces. Joining this easy target is the implication that the form's aesthetic frame, which often intends to promote our connection to nature, actually serves to disconnect us. This paper reviews critiques of nature sound recording and suggests that by confronting what it excludes from ‘nature’, the form might yet come to terms with ecology.

Since its conception, Denis Smalley's spectromorphology has equipped listeners and practitioners of electroacoustic music with appropriate and relevant vocabulary to describe the sound-shapes, sensations and evocations associated with experiences of acousmatic sound. This liberation has facilitated and permitted much-needed discussion about sound events, structures and other significant sonic detail. More than 20 years on, it is safe to assume that within the electroacoustic music community there is an agreed and collective understanding of spectromorphological vocabulary and its descriptive application. Spectromorphology's influence has been far reaching, inciting approaches to electroacoustic music analysis (Thoresen 2007), notation (Patton 2007), composition and education through its flexible functionality and accessible pool of vocabulary.

Most accounts of rhythm focus on notions of duration, pulse and metre, to explore the practices and constructs by which those involved in music performances co-ordinate their involvement. Yet there is a significant body of musical practice where sounds co-habit in time, without the same sorts of constraints found in metric co-ordination: from the gentle singing of Joseph Beuys during his Action Piece I Like America and America Likes Me, to Paul McCartney's song ‘Blackbird’. This is similar, say, to the improvisation practice of composer and trombonist George Lewis in his work with the computer programme Voyager. Starting from some ideas laid out by Gaston Bachelard and Gregory Bateson, and recent writings on critical post-humanism, this paper explores ways of considering ecologies of sounds in time, and their consequences for human musical experience.

This paper presents a detailed study of two works that arrive at sounds composed through the experience of sounds heard. Frances White's composition Centre Bridge, composed in 1999 for two shakuhachi and tape, is based largely on the sounds of a sonorous metal grate bridge that crosses the Delaware River between New Jersey and Pennsylvania. ASound Map of the Danube, composed by Annea Lockwood in 2005, reflects four years of sound recording along the length of that river's European to Balkan trajectory. Employing a range of diverse technical tools and aesthetic ideas, both works convey, powerfully and dynamically, a sense of deeply invested listening. I approach the discussion of specific compositional processes and musical outcomes in these two works through an investigation of Lockwood's and White's firsthand experiences as both listeners and composers. Centring on the exchange between sensing body and thinking mind, my research here engages with the arc of the creative process as an experience permeated by spaces of perception, reflection, imagination and action.

The concepts introduced by Smalley in the context of space-form (2007) have firmly put acousmatic music on a discourse of spatial exploration, holding much potential for the developing of aesthetics in new directions. This article approaches space from the low level of musical structure, with a multi-dimensional attitude to space-form, exploring spatial texture, a concept introduced by Smalley to describe the temporal formations of space in spectromorphology (1997). Spatial articulation is investigated in the context of granular-oriented textures, proposing a micro-spatial, perceptual morphology – the texton – as an aesthetic approach to acousmatic music. This follows Albert Bregman's speculation regarding equivalents to visual perception in texture, where the theory of textons was first developed by the neuroscientist Béla Julesz.

The article discusses acousmatic textons, in terms of intrinsic properties, the way they propagate in time, and how they organise in distributions to form spatial textures. The emergent macroscopic qualities of textonal formations are also reflected upon in the introduction of a group of textural states, where source-bonded spaces and abstract musical thinking coalesce.

This paper adapts Martin Heidegger's philosophy of ‘dwelling’ in order to effect a liaison between acousmatic music and ecological concern. I propose this as an alternative to both the propagandist use of music as a means of protest and to using the science of ecology as a domain that might furnish new compositional means. I advance the interpretation that acousmatic music ‘occupies the air’ in ways that transform the meaning of that dimension. It allows the sky to be sky and the earth, earth. I use the precedent of bell ringing as an example of sonic activity that occupies the air in order to further dwelling.

The paper examines issues emergent from the construction of my work the bird ghost at the zaouia, which transliterates recorded experience and memory of time and place. Islamic ritual and public spaces were recorded, reworked, re-routed and re-sited in a work that references, comments upon and potentially reconfigures the Islamic sonic-social. Tracing my own stance, the paper foregrounds emergent issues in the recording and use of highly culturally freighted sounds. I trace three broad areas: 1. Sonic Orientalism – the use of sound that carries ‘Eastern’ cultural and religious significance in order to signal a certain kind of alterity; 2. The development of a compositional strategy that seeks a middle-path between acousmatic and acoustic-ecological debates; and 3. A cross-cultural comparison between modes of listening. In addition I discuss the contexts of debates on the permissibility of music within Islam, and also world-musics that trade on the romanticised alterity of sonic tourism. I draw parallels between an ‘ethically responsive sensorium’ characteristic of Islamic aural disciplines and the ‘aesthetically attuned sensorium’ engaged by sonic arts. I argue for an approach that is inclusive of the sonic and the full spectrum of vibration through ramified networks of memory and meaning.

Audio excerpts available at: www.sethayyaz.com/sound-works/bird-ghost-at-the-zaouia

This four-part exposition revisits Denis Smalley's concept of sound surrogacy from a critical constructive approach. In the first part, Smalley's article from 1997 serves as a point of origin for a close investigation of his concept. We examine the precise definitions and demarcations in his concepts and we attempt to systematise the model. In the second part of the investigation we attempt to solve some of the problems in Smalley's model by suggesting a new surrogacy model originating in Smalley's idea, but with a more formal structure and obvious demarcations. Having presented this new surrogacy model, with references to Georges Bataille's theories on base materialism as well as anthropological studies, we attempt to create a new order of surrogacy that in its object relation is positioned beneath Smalley's first-order surrogacy (as the remote surrogacy order is placed above the third-order surrogacy) – an impossible/paradoxical category that will be termed transgressive sound surrogacy. In the fourth part we demonstrate this new surrogacy order in a series of examples found in art and culture.

This article seeks to form a deeper understanding of the performance ecosystem by drawing parallels with Bourriaud's Relational Aesthetics and Guattari's conception of subjectivity as outlined in Chaosmosis. Through an examination of participation within performance, and a recognition of the mutability of the roles of performer, listener, instrument and environment in the creation of the music event, this article examines the place of subjectivity, the capacity for self-creation, in the formation of a group aesthetic. Such a concept places the creation of meaning not within the individual participant but rather within the relationship between participants in a situation, a relationship that recognises the interaction between individuals, societies and institutions in its production. Such a discussion helps further our understanding of the performance ecosystem as a conceptual tool.

Denis Smalley devoted himself to the elaboration of a method based on the analysis of spectral transformations by connoting sonorous motions and adopting metaphors borrowed from non-musical contexts. While considering Smalley's earlier theorising within the context of past and contemporary research, this paper focuses on the use of non-musical models in spectromorphological design in order to show how sonorous qualities, imaginative factors and extra-musical meanings concurred in defining new cognitive itineraries and in extending the terminology adopted, thereby establishing the basis of a new compositional approach.

This is an essay exploring issues of essentialism, sound-in-itself and representation that were central to a project I completed in 2010. It covers this project in the context of theory and work by Seth Kim-Cohen, CREED, Don Ihde and Annea Lockwood.

The field recording is often presented in sound art as an unproblematic account of a sonic event or environment. It also prompts a particular kind of listening that approaches the sound as somehow real or accurate. This article, and my work in general, problematises this encounter and seeks to uncover the various approaches to listening that occur when dealing with field recordings, as well as the possibilities within field recordings for exploring essentialism, imagined sound and the conceptual.

An application of ecological psychology, based on the work of James J. Gibson, to electroacoustic music would consider the listener in relationship with both the work and the environment, in a dynamic and mutually informing relationship. This perspective is applied to various electroacoustic concert paradigms, demonstrating a wide range of listening experiences; the implications for electroacoustic music as a genre are examined. Several qualities of acousmatic music are used to explore some potential limitations of Gibson's theories. Finally, some relative strengths and weaknesses of ecological psychology are considered, as well as some potentially fruitful cooperations with other, somewhat divergent, theoretical approaches.

This article describes several recent projects that together illustrate an evolving practice and a philosophy of ecoacoustic sound art called EcoSono. These projects foreground adventure – the live, in-person engagement with the world. As a technological sound art practice, EcoSono uses technology to link human and environmental expression, in an attempt to define a collaborative and symbiotic relationship between humans and the natural world. At the core of this work are computational and transduction technologies enabling deeper human–environment interaction. This paper describes three projects including the MICE (Mobile Interactive Computer Ensemble) World Tour, the EcoSono Institute music/science collaboration adventure, and the Agents Against Agency series in emergent and improvised musical forms. The article also addresses several key values of interactive ecoacoustics. First, it describes the importance of ‘impracticality’ in creating a productive environmentalist art work. The article also makes the case that the purpose of outdoor recording is not the acquisition of material samples, but to hear the world and learn from it.

By drawing concept diagrams of Smalley's seminal writings, I have attempted to show how Smalley's ideas on acousmatic music have evolved from manipulating sound objects to creating ‘space-forms’. The work Wind Chimes is analysed with respect to spectromorphology and sound shapes, and it is compared to the work Base Metals, which is analysed with respect to spectral space. A connection is then made between the evolution in writing and the evolution in composition.

This paper examines the use of soundscape elements and mimetic sound-identities in the music of Denis Smalley. It attempts to reconcile these elements with the acousmatic tradition from which his music emerges, illustrating that it does not represent a contradiction, but rather a refined aesthetic where spectromorphological and soundscape concerns relate in symbiosis. A close look at key works, including Empty Vessels (1997), Valley Flow (1992) and Pentes (1974), reveals how these elements manifest themselves in his work, and how the spectromorphological and soundscape aspects of these pieces work together toward shared goals.

Whilst it is common in much discourse around contemporary musical practices to emphasise the differences between digital and acoustic ways of making music, Simon Waters’ discussion of the Performance Ecosystem as an analytic perspective argues instead for a heightened sense of continuity (Waters 2007). This article lends support to this argument by developing an ecosystemically situated account of our relationships with technology and processes of skill formation. It is argued that this sense of continuity is justified, but that where differences of experiences do arise these are not, as sometimes supposed, an essential characteristic of digital technologies. On the basis that much of our skill formation consists of tacit knowledge, it is suggested that further discussion on how particular circumstances and skills arise would be revealing. Two possible headings for such discussion are suggested in the form of ‘Agility’ and ‘Playfulness’.