To a practising composer the term 'frequency domain' must refer primarily to the ways s/he organises pitch material. Additionally, to the experienced electroacoustic composer, it will refer to the treatment of the spectral content of sounds used, which may or may not be a conscious act within the compositional process.

The two preceding issues within Vol. 2 of Organised Sound have focused upon the time and frequency domains, so it is perhaps appropriate that we now consider the analysis–synthesis paradigm which inevitably unites them. More specifically, the analysis and synthesis theme brings together discussions of the time and frequency domains under the umbrella of professional musical practice within the musicological, compositional, performance or technological realms. It is a theme which is inextricably linked to the working practice of many within the field, and one which has particular resonance for musical work.

The theme chosen for Vol. 2 No 1 of Organized Sound is one which the editors hope will become a thread for future issues. The reader may be curious why this subject has been chosen.

When referring to the electroacoustic community, we often picture a set of select institutions whose members are engaged in the process of music making by electronic means. This mythic community is assumed to have a unity of purpose and a common set of be liefs. However, considering the divergence of positions expressed in and around this ‘community’, we are tempted to dismiss the notion of any commonality. If we reframe our thinking and avoid transcendence to be ‘in a pure field of immanence’ (Deleuze 1988b: 7), we have the potential for a new definition of collegiality which may permit a community-in-becoming to emerge within electroacoustics.

Pitch and loudness are subjective aspects of sound which can be described in terms of the observed abilities of subjects to rate them on a scale from ‘low’ to ‘high’. Timbre is a subjective aspect of sound for which there is no such scale and neither qualitative nor quantitative descriptions are generally found that are widely accepted. The purpose of this paper is to shed light on some frequency domain aspects of the nature of timbre by making use of the results obtained from an analysis system which is designed to take advantage of contemporary psychoacoustical knowledge relating to human peripheral hearing. Results are presented which illustrate the relationship between contemporary psychoacoustic ideas relating to timbre and ideas first discussed by Helmholtz and later taken up by other researchers. Analyses by the system of a selection of sounds from acoustic musical instruments with clear timbral differences are also presented in order to place these discussions in a musical context.

In this article, and within the context of sound art as a basis for artistic freedom in experimental music and art, the development of pendulum-based sculptural instruments and an improvisational form of video called ‘percussive video’ are described. Methods used to produce time-based public art events are also outlined, and their effectiveness in directing social change at the local level is discussed.

Over the past five years, a digital community of CD-ROM artists has begun to emerge. The one element that serves as the common thread to this particular community is that these artists and their works are based on a new musical presentation, one fully tied to a visual element, an interactive, exploratory world that is tailored to the individual user's progress through a finite number of elements. In short, although intermedia works have a long history, now the user may explore at his/her own pace. This unique manner of presentation has emerged into the worlds of art music, underground music, and performance art.

Working on Analogique B in the late 1950s, Xenakis formulated the ‘hypothesis of a second order sonority’. This paper focuses on this concept, and shows its crucial meaning in the composition of a number of pieces, such as Concret PH, Analogique B and the very recent Gendy3 and S709. The perspective taken is twofold: on one side, the problem of 2nd-order sonorities is seen as a problem in modelling perceptual attributes (or timbre) of sound in terms of ‘emergent properties of organised sound structure’. This is also related to the composer’s pioneering work with granular sound representations and nonstandard methods of sound synthesis. On the other, the issue is discussed in conjunction with Xenakis’ attempt at implementing thoroughly formalised ‘mechanisms’ or ‘systems’ based on the mathematics of stochastic processes. The paper shows that the issue touched on here is essential to the aesthetics of Xenakis’ electroacoustic music. It also questions whether the formalisation of stochastics is a suitable means to let 2nd-order sonorities emerge from the internal life of the sound matter. The limitations of Xenakis’ ‘mechanisms’ are described in terms of their cybernetics, and are situated in the context of artistic and scientific paradigm shifts concerning the relationship between order, disorder and chaos.

This paper explores the relationship between how we use and theorise frequency as musicians and how frequency is perceived by listeners within the technological and ideological context of electroacoustic music. With reference to work in perception, music theory and aesthetics, it is argued that thinking about frequency is still dominated by the idea of music’s abstract significance. It is suggested that although electroacoustic music presents a challenge to such ideology, this challenge is not reflected in current musical research, leading to a peculiar dislocation between practice and theory. In conclusion, it is proposed that studying the ways in which frequency structure contributes to meaning might provide a better understanding of the production and perception of electroacoustic music than studying frequency structure in itself.

Sound modelling is an important part of the analysis–synthesis process since it combines sound processing and algorithmic synthesis within the same formalism. Its aim is to make sound simulators by synthesis methods based on signal models or physical models, the parameters of which are directly extracted from the analysis of natural sounds. In this article the successive steps for making such systems are described. These are numerical synthesis and sound generation methods, analysis of natural sounds, particularly time–frequency and time–scale (wavelet) representations, extraction of pertinent parameters, and the determination of the correspondence between these parameters and those corresponding to the synthesis models. Additive synthesis, nonlinear synthesis, and waveguide synthesis are discussed.

This article may be considered the outline of an ongoing study of different types of structural concepts, and their referential or non-referential content, in electroacoustic, computer and mixed music composed mostly in French electroacoustic music studios (GRM, IRCAM, UPIC, GMEM, etc.). This analytical study began in Hungary in 1988, in the course of a broadcast series on certain chapters of the history of electroacoustic music.This work has been supported in Hungary by the Soros Foundation. The study later investigated narrativity in electroacoustic music,In the form of a paper presented at the 2nd International Symposium on Musical Signification (Helsinki, 1988), published in French, in the No. 51 issue of MUSICWORKS Magazine, and in the Acts of the Symposium published in English, in 1995: ‘Narrativity and electroacoustic music’, in Musical signification, E. Tarasti, ed., Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin and New York. and then incorporated a more complex typology embracing formal, structural approaches in about thirty characteristic works composed since the 1970s. Work on these selected pieces offers a range of investigations into their structure, from the assumption of the oldest structural concepts through to very recent ideas.Plan of a book, some chapters of which were drafted in France, from 1990 onwards, thanks to a grant awarded to CIREM by the Direction de la Musique du Ministère de la Culture, with a view to publishing works on electroacoustic music.

Electronic music seems to be a problem for music publishers. Providing a tape for a performance is not in itself so difficult, but how do you preserve such tapes? What do you do if the musician asks for an ‘8-track ADAT’? What do you do when s omebody comes back with an old 2-inch tape and tells you that there are dropouts in it? And what happens when a well-known work is requested which you, as publisher, appear not even to have in stock?

Assuming that perception works as a constant dialectic between sense-data and concept, this paper presents a perceptual analysis of J. C. Risset‘s Sud according to a conceptual framework based on a complementarity between intrinsic and extrinsic connotations in electroacoustic music. From this perspective, Sud may be perceived as an encounter between human imagination and nature in two of its most powerful symbols: the sea, alluded to through the sounds of the waves, and the forest, alluded to through the sounds of birds and insects. The piece presents an exploration of the essence of these environmental sounds, which are either modified or recreated with different substances. In its appeal to images widespread in a variety of cultures, as well as in its unique use of traditional musical materials, Sud is more than a strongly programmatic and visually evocative piece.

This article introduces the ‘Charm of Sound’ (COS) association, its purposes and activities, and gives a view of what the electroacoustic community at large means for this particular sub-community.

Analysis–resynthesis (A–R) systems gain their flexibility for creative transformation of sound by representing sound as a set of musically useful features. The analysis process extracts these features from the time domain signal by means of a time–frequency representation (TFR). The TFR provides an intermediate representation of sound that must make the features accessible and measurable to the rest of the analysis. Until very recently, the short-time Fourier transform (STFT) has been the obvious choice for time–frequency representation, despite its limitations in terms of resolution. Recent and ongoing developments are providing several alternative schemes that allow for a more considered choice of TFR. This paper reviews these contemporary approaches in comparison with the more classical ones and with reference to their applicability, merits and shortcomings for application to sound analysis. (Where they have been successfully applied, details are provided.) The techniques reviewed include linear, bilinear and higher-order spectra, nonparametric and parametric methods and some sound-model-specific TFRs.

The time–frequency representation (TFR) is the initial stage of analysis in sound/music analysis–resynthesis (A–R) systems. Given a time-domain waveform, the TFR makes temporal and spectral detail available to the remainder of the analysis, so that the component features may be extracted. The resulting ‘feature set’ must represent the sound as completely as the original time-domain signal, if the A–R system is to be capable of effective transformation and good synthesis sound quality. Therefore the system as a whole is reliant upon the TFR to make the sound components detectable, separable and measurable. Yet the standard TFR to-date is the short-time Fourier transform (STFT), of which the shortcomings, in terms of resolution, are well recognised. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the importance of the TFR to system function and system design. Poor feature extraction is shown to result from the use of inappropriate TFRs, whose underlying assumptions and expectations do not match those of the system. Existing models are used as case studies, with examples of performance for different sound types. A philosophy for A–R system design that includes TFR design is presented and a methodology for implementing it is proposed.

The background to the creation of an international resource organisation is discussed. The author goes on to describe various activities of the Foundation, including the provision of hard-to-obtain CDs and access to other materials of interest to the electroacoustic community. The Foundation maintains a substantial presence on the World Wide Web: http://www.emf.org

The art of music is no longer limited to the sounding models of instruments and voices. Electoacoustic music opens access to all sounds, a bewildering sonic array ranging from the real to the surreal and beyond. For listeners the traditional links with physical sound-making are frequently ruptured: electroacoustic sound-shapes and qualities frequently do not indicate known sources and causes. Gone are the familiar articulations of instruments and vocal utterance: gone is the stability of note and interval: gone too is the reference of beat and metre. Composers also have problems: how to cut an aesthetic path and discover a stability in a wide-open sound world, how to develop appropriate sound-making methods, how to select technologies and software.

In the early 1970s, you could have gone to Trevor Wishart's front garden on St Mary's in York and found huge slabs of steel sheeting. You could have walked into the Lyons Concert Hall of York University and found him and several other people using 20′ scaffolding poles as trumpets (now that's a great sound!). While I was still in the States in 1969, I made a 3′ diameter red gong from the hood of a truck ( = bonnet of a lorry) and could be seen striking a suspended piece of ¼“ curved steel flooring with a sledge hammer, etc. etc. Scenes like this were duplicated across the world. Why? How did it start? Sounds, sounds – the sounds were there, they wanted out. How did they get in? Anybody's guess really, but maybe a clue is what often happens while working in the studio. You've been deploying a sound and then seem to hear it at a time when playback is switched off, then realise that it's coming in from outside the building. The sounds are out there in the environment. We have ears (and other ways of sensing vibrations) and so the sounds have found a way to get inside us. Now they want out again. Composers: they just can't help it.

This article discusses the theoretical principles governing the short time Fourier transform (STFT) and its musical applications, using the CARL phase vocoder and the Composers' Desktop Project (CDP) spectral transformations. The former was originally developed by Dolson (1986, 1991) and ported to personal computer systems by Atkins, Bentley, Henderson, Orton and Wishart (Atkins, Bentley, Endrich, Fischman, Malham, Orton and Wishart 1987, Wishart 1994a). The latter was developed by Wishart (1994b). When possible, theoretical matters are presented in a qualitative way, keeping the number and complexity of mathematical expressions within the essential requirements for those interested in musical applications. The latter are accompanied by sound examples, including excerpts from pieces by the author.