Editorial: The sonic and the electronic in improvisation, part 2

This is the second issue on the topic ‘The sonic and the electronic in improvisation’, the first – Organised Sound 26(1) – having appeared in April 2021. The articles in that first volume coalesced around some interesting themes, including networked communication in electroacoustic improvisation, the electroacoustic extension of acoustic instruments, the ‘performer plus’ paradigm, the instrument as co-performer, and the electronic ‘other’. Interestingly, there is a different set of threads running between the articles in this second issue, giving it a rather different flavour than its predecessor. Prime among the themes found here is the analysis of improvisation, which is explicitly tackled in Pierre Couprie’s article but also plays an important role in articles by Lauri Hyvärinen, Alex White, Drake Andersen and James Andean. Articles by Luigi Marino and Lauri Hyvärinen examine and compare different improvisation communities, displaced and/or connected both geographically and aesthetically. While practitioner perspectives were included in the first issue, most clearly in Alistair MacDonald’s article on ‘Co-estrangement in live electroacoustic improvisation’, this thread is taken up again in this second issue in articles by John Richards and Tim Shaw, Matthew James Noone, Luigi Marino and James Andean. All of this, I think, gives the two issues rather different ‘flavours’: where issue one covered a variety of substantially different contexts for improvisation, in terms of both technical approaches and philosophy, issue two is a bit more musicological and, to some extent, more explicitly people centred. The first article, my own contribution ‘Group Performance Paradigms in Free Improvisation’, discusses differences in performer perspective in smallensemble free improvisation, and groups these into four key paradigms, followed by analysis of key examples drawn from the broader field of sonic and electroacoustic improvisation. This is followed by Pierre Couprie’s ‘Analytical Approaches to Electroacoustic Music Improvisation’, which proposes techniques for using visualisation tools for the analysis of free improvisation, within the broader context of electroacoustic analysis. Couprie constructs a framework based on three pillars: acoustic analysis, music analysis and the design of graphic representations. This framework is demonstrated by applying it to extracts of electroacoustic improvisations performed by Les Phonogénistes, of which Couprie is himself a member. In ‘New Technologies, Old Behaviours: Electronic media and electronic music improvisors in Europe at the turn of the millennium’, Luigi Marino compares and contrasts two key geographic centres of the European scene: Echtzeitmusik in Berlin and the New London Silence in London. Marino includes detailed interview material with key improvisors in each of these scenes to illuminate their approaches to electronics, and the possible relationship(s) between these and their broader performance styles and aesthetics. In their article ‘Improvisation through Performanceinstallation’, John Richards and Tim Shaw present their idea of ‘performance-installation’ as an art form, and relationships to improvisation (among other things). The article demonstrates these ideas in action with a fascinating tour through a series of conceptual and situated performances by the authors, some in collaboration with Japanese performance artist Tetsuya Umeda. (There are some interesting links here with several articles in the previous issue on this theme, including articles by Jonathan Higgins – ideas of ‘failure’ in performance; Paul Stapleton and Tom Davis – including shared links with ecological psychology; AdamPultzMelbye’s ‘agents and environments’; and possibly also with Jimmy Eadie’s ideas on ‘attendance’.) Like Luigi Marino’s article, Lauri Hyvärinen’s ‘Gesture and Texture in the Electroacoustic Improvised Music of Jin Sangtae, Hong Chulki and Tetuzi Akiyama’ also examines the music of two improvisation scenes: Seoul’s ‘Dotolim’ scene and Tokyo’s onkyô scene. Hyvärinen, however, offers an analysis-based approach, focusing specifically on the performers’ uses of gesture and texture, and their use of these materials to ‘bridge’ the two approaches. The article expands on this to propose gesture and texture as the keys to understanding improvised performance. This is followed by Drake Andersen’s ‘Spaces for People: Technology, improvisation, and social interaction in the music of Pauline Oliveros’. Andersen delves into Oliveros’s work through its focus on ‘social interaction and community-building’, drawing attention to the role that technology can play in ‘facilitating social