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The life and times of Peter Zinovieff (1933–2021) have been amply commented upon and there are numerous testimonies of his role on developing electronic music as well as his strong impact on musicians throughout the 1970s. However, besides his important role in developing synthesisers, sound processing and various other devices, he is now recognised as a significant pioneer in music with computers. His collaboration with Harrison Birtwistle’s opera The Mask of Orpheus has been deemed an important contribution to contemporary music in Great Britain. Finally, his late return to composition and performance shows his lifelong attachment to innovation and experimentation in music.

International audience; Ce volume 17 de Musique • Images • Instruments est le premier consacré à la musique du XXe siècle et à ses instruments. Marc Battier en a été le concepteur à nos côtés. Il ouvre donc cette livraison par une introduction sur la lutherie électrique et électronique organisée selon plusieurs critères : cinq périodes qui reflètent l’évolution des technologies, une définition des termes « électrique » et « électronique » ; les systèmes classificatoires ; les laboratoires de recherche et les studios de musique électro-acoustique, enfin l’évolution des synthétiseurs et des programmes de synthèse du son dans le cadre de l’informatique musicale. La section des instruments électriques, propose tout d’abord une synthèse de Steve Waksman sur les débuts de la guitare électrique en Amérique du Nord jusqu’à sa large commercialisation à la fin des années 30. La seconde section, celle des instruments électroniques, s’intéresse à la célèbre Croix sonore qui fait l’objet d’une étude très documentée par Thierry Maniguet qui expose sa genèse par le compositeur Nicolas Obouhow, sa réalisation en 1932-33 en un seul exemplaire et sa très éphémère carrière jusqu’en 1939 alors que sa « réception » fut excellente. Trois instruments électroniques de la famille des orgues sont ensuite évoqués en détail. Le piano-orgue électronique de Coupleux et Givelet, qui, comme le démontre Olivier Carpentier, n’eut guère de postérité en raison des conséquences de la crise économique de 1929. Ensuite l’orgue radio-synthétique conçu par l’abbé Puget et Léonce de Saint-Martin. Christophe D’Alessandro détaille cette première tentative de synthèse des sons dont la réception controversée explique sa brièveté d’utilisation alors qu’elle annonce de nombreuses recherches instrumentales. Jean Claude Battault s’intéresse ensuite à Constant Martin qui a contribué au développement de la synthèse sonore, tant dans le domaine classique, avec les orgues électroniques liturgiques que dans celui de la variété avec le clavioline. Peter Asimov se focalise grâce à des sources inédites sur l’indéniable popularisation des Ondes Martenot grâce aux concerts-spectacles de l’Exposition internationale de Paris en 1937, sur les ressources qu’elles proposent aux compositeurs, sur la performance et leur impact « domestique » et « exotique » où se mélent son et image. Cette livraison s’intéresse ensuite à deux laboratoires de recherche allemands. Grâce au travail d’Elena Ungeheuer et Oliver Wiener, on peut découvrir le Melochord d’Harald Bode à Cologne qui eut de multiples utilisations : les médias de masse, les loisirs et la musique expérimentale. Tatjana Böhm-Mehner offre d’autre part une étude détaillée du Subharchord développé au tournant des années 50-60 en RDA à Berlin. Utilisé par les studios de dessin animé et de radio, il servit entre 1962 et 1974 pour une quarantaine d’œuvres relevant de la musique de danse et de divertissement ou de la musique contemporaine tantôt officielle tantôt avant-gardiste. Un triptyque permet également d’approcher trois moments particuliers de la recherche en France : les réalisations du GRM présentées par Daniel Teruggi, du Phonogène de Pierre Schaeffer en passant par les différents systèmes SYTER jusqu’aux GRM Tools actuels. Ensuite celles des Studios Puce Muse (Centre de Création de musique visuelle à Rungis) où Serge de Laubier a développé le Méta-Instrument, instrument numérique dont Pierre Couprie rappelle la genèse et les quatre versions successives. Enfin celles développées à l’IRCAM en 2012 par Jean Bresson pour l’opéra Re Orso de Marco Stroppa.Toutes ces études sont complétées par la présentation de deux collections européennes particulièrement révélatrices des développements technologiques et musicaux : celle du Technisches Museum de Vienne, réunie et présentée par Peter Donhauser, puis celle qui a été constituée à partir de 1991 par Marc Battier pour le nouveau musée de la Musique à La Villette et dont Thierry Maniguet et Philippe Bruguière montrent le développement depuis l’ouverture du musée de la Musique en 1997.

The question of notation regarding electroacoustic music has appeared episodically along the course of its development. With the advent of digital techniques, now universally used, through the development of musicological studies of the field, and with the surge of interactive devices between computers and performers, the need for various forms of representing sounds and data has never been so strong.

Sixty years ago, musique concrète was born of the single-handed efforts of one man, Pierre Schaeffer. How did the first experiments become a School and produce so many rich works? As this issue of Organised Sound addresses various aspects of the GRM activities throughout sixty years of musical adventure, this article discusses the musical thoughts behind the advent and the development of the music created and theoretised at the Paris School formed by the Schaefferian endeavours. Particular attention is given to the early twentieth-century conceptions of musical sounds and how poets, artists and musicians were expressing their quest for, as Apollinaire put it, ‘new sounds new sounds new sounds’. The questions of naming, gesture, sound capture, processing and diffusion are part of the concepts thoroughly revisited by the GRMC, then the GRM in 1958, up to what is known as acousmatic music. Other contributions, such as Teruggi's, give readers insight into the technical environments and innovations that took place at the GRM. This present article focuses on the remarkable unity of the GRM. This unity has existed alongside sixty years of activity and dialogue with researchers of other fields and constant attention to the latter-day scientific, technological and philosophical ideas which have had a strong influence in shaping the development of GRM over the course of its history.

Encompassing more than a century, music created through the use of diverse artificial audio technologies faces loss: of written documents, of musical scores, of instruments, machines and devices, of functional electronic components, of techniques and of a sense of the necessity which drove musicians to use a particular technology in a given context. In turn, the loss of documents leads to misunderstanding or oblivion. Today's electroacoustic music studies offer ways to remedy the danger of loss.

As the techniques used in creating audio art and electronic music become more diversified and increasingly use some sort of computer-oriented notation, the question of analysis of this wide repertoire is revisited. While there are still many obstacles in its study, this topic attracts more attention today than in the recent past. In this article, I emphasise the need to consider that, when analysing audio art and electronic music, technology, technique and musical style are to be taken in account. To this end, I introduce concepts put forth by the Russian Constructivists as a basis for reflection.

National audience; Présentation de l'Acousmographe de l'INA-GRM pour l'analyse et la représentation graphique de la musique électroacoustique.

This issue of Leonardo features an article by Ben Syverson of criticalartware, the first winner of the Leonardo-EMS Award for Excellence. I offer here a brief history of the Electroacoustic Music Studies (EMS) Network to place the award in context. The EMS Network was organized to fill an important gap in the field of electroacoustic music, namely to foster better understanding of the various manifestations of electroacoustic music. EMS aims to promote and encourage musical studies on electroacoustic music and to provide a regular framework for discussion and diffusion of the results. Areas related to the study of electroacoustic music range from the musicological to more interdisciplinary approaches, from studies concerning the impact of technology on musical creativity to the investigation of the ubiquitous nature of electroacoustic sounds today. The choice to call the organization a network is of fundamental importance to our mission, as one of our goals is to make relevant initiatives more widely available. Leigh Landy, of De Montfort University’s Music, Technology and Research Centre (Leicester, U.K.), and I began the EMS Network to create a recognized platform for sharing scholarship in the field of electroacoustic music. The creation of a bilingual conference specifically focused on relevant areas seemed to us a logical first step in creating such a platform. We proposed a meeting that became part of Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique’s (IRCAM) Resonances conference in 2003, entitled “Electroacoustic Musics: A Century of Innovation Involving Sound and Technology—resources, discourse, analytical tools.” This became the first EMS Network event, albeit prior to the actual launch of the EMS Network. Subsequent to this event, we were joined by Daniel Teruggi of the Groupe de Recherches Musicale de l’Institut National de l’Audiovisuel (INA/GRM). Since then the network has grown to such a point that annual conferences are now scheduled through 2011. Leonardo/OLATS has established a collaboration with the EMS Network to give an annual LeonardoEMS Award for Excellence for the best contributions to the EMS conference by emerging researchers, as decided by a joint jury. The 2006 conference was the first occurrence of this award, given to criticalartware for the presentation of their project likn. Although the main theme of the 2006 conference was language and terminology, this was not the only topic discussed. Indeed, criticalartware’s contribution was based on a rather different topic, as reflected in the paper’s original title, “likn: A Flexible Platform for Information and Metadata Exchange.” Conceived as an artwork and a sharp critical approach to Internet communication, the contribution stood out by virtue of its theoretical context and convincing implementation. As criticalartware puts it

This article addresses problems in the relationship between performer and musical instrument. The author presents “synchronicity,” a concept introduced by the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, and proposes that sound and gesture should be events in synchronicity relative to the performer. This is an alternative to the traditional Western view that the world is ruled by causality. Electronic instruments have a noncausal character, and synchronicity defines an attitude that takes this factor into account. Two simple and inexpensive gesture instruments are presented as practical applications: the Dada Glove and the Sonar System.