Since the inception of electroacoustic music in 1948, much has been written about technical developments. This book is one of the first to examine aesthetic issues central to this rapidly developing genre. It brings together composers from leading academic departments and studios in Britain, the United States, Canada and Paris with a wide range of approaches and opinions, resulting in a study which is likely to have a marked impact on current debates on the future of electroacoustic music. The book is divided into three sections. The first, Culture and Language, considers the relationship between music and the listener's perception and expectation. Materials and Lanugage looks at the types of materials available to composers and the way in which the internal structure of the sound can have implications for the overall structure of a piece. The final section, The Influence of New Technology, considers the relationship between computer systems and the music they are helping to create.

Innovations in music technology bring with them a new set of challenges for describing and understanding the electroacoustic repertoire. This edited collection presents a state-of-the-art overview of analysis methods for electroacoustic music in this rapidly developing field. The first part of the book explains the needs of differing electroacoustic genres and puts forward a template for the analysis of electroacoustic music. Part II discusses the latest ideas in the field and the challenges associated with new technologies, while Part III explores how analyses have harnessed the new forces of multimedia, and includes an introduction to new software programme EAnalysis, which was created by the editors as the result of an Arts and Humanities Research Council grant. The final part of the book demonstrates these new methods in action, with analyses of key electroacoustic works from a wide range of genres and sources.

First Published in 1994. The contributions to this collection have been selected to define a range of interests from the technical, aesthetic, cognitive and compositional spheres. The book addresses the continuing need for musicologists, psychologists, composers and listeners to enter into a creative dialogue with designers and builders, who are usually programmers in the contemporary world. The collection as a whole will help to demonstrate the great potential for exchange between the multidisciplinary approaches to music.