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While the recent explosion of affordable software has placed powerful electronic music production tools within reach of anyone with a smart phone or a tablet, there are important aspects of music composition that technology has failed to address. In fact, much audio software subtly encourages prefabricated aesthetic solutions via the user interface, resulting in a cookie-cutter approach to music creation. As a result, much of the electronic music we hear today rarely ventures into new territory by exploring new structures. One solution could be to employ a compositional tool that enables a composer to generate new and unusual structures derived from mathematical relationships such as the Fibonacci series, the Golden Ratio or other mathematical patterns found in nature. Luckily, such a tool exists and is part of a vast system of music composition created in the twentieth century by the visionary music theoretician and composer Joseph Schillinger. In this article the author explores a Schillinger technique called ‘composing with density groups’ which can be used to create unique musical structures on paper or in any digital audio workstation (DAW). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Notation can be seen to sit conformably between theory and practice as it symbolizes practice, generates and implements theory, and produces practice. Historically, its presence changes in significance across the development of activities such as music or architecture. From design tool to canonic text, notational artefacts both solidify and formalize practice, as will be expanded below. How, then, does the role and function of notation change with specific contemporary practices, which are by definition ill-defined and feed off fluidity and change? What is the nature of notation in distributed and collaborative practices such as improvised music or network music performance? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following paper explores the fundamental aesthetic importance of algorithms in musical practice. It focuses upon areas of potentially far-reaching aesthetic consequence that currently seem to pose some problems/misunderstandings/misconceptions or an awkwardness of interface between the disciplines of computer science and music composition—including approaches to symbolic manipulation systems, and concepts such as optimization, population, fitness and search space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper employs a Wittgensteinian framework to describe the experience of listening to the music of Mathias Spahlinger. First, a 'skeptical puzzle' is introduced, based on a reading of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. The puzzle problematizes the security of ascriptions of meaning to material practices. Then, Spahlinger's ephemere is used as a test case: it is described from a first-person perspective, compared with an account of the work given by Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf, and given as an example of an audible presentation of the 'skeptical puzzle'. Such a presentation is marked by a phenomenon that Wittgenstein described as 'the dawning of an aspect'. By focusing on the role of aspect perception and the problems of ascription in Spahlinger's music, it is possible to argue against Mahnkopf's criticism of Spahlinger's work, as well as understand an underlying affinity between extreme forms of repetition and perpetual transition within Spahlinger's compositional habitus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]