Program

2026 05 23

Bankettsaal

09:00am – 10:00am
paper session #9
Chi-Wei Lin | Beyond Notation: Li-Yue , From Centralized Spectacle to a Community Model
Alexandre Sasset-Blouin | Mutable Scores: Embracing Non-Finality in Notation
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Beyond Notation: Li-Yue , From Centralized Spectacle to a Community Model

Chi-Wei Lin | Independent artist-researcher, Paris, France

Ever since the dominance of score-centered composition in Western art music, musical organization has largely been understood as a process of pre-definition and centralized control. This paper proposes an alternative perspective by examining sound practices that operate through rule-based procedures, distributed agency, and collective coordination. Drawing on examples from Eastern Ritual-Music (Li-Yue) systems, and Lin Chiwei’s participatory sound modules, the study situates these practices within a broader historical and theoretical context that challenges linear notions of authorship, form, and musical intention. Rather than simply aestheticizing order, these modules explore whether decentralized, embodied protocols can generate new modes of social coordination. The work reimagines Yue not as a fixed representation, but as an evolving process—a generative system in which rhythm, error, and interaction together give rise to structure. Ultimately, It asks how we might sound together again— without being driven by an obsession with spectacle.

Chi-Wei Lin

Born in Taiwan in 1971, Lin Chi-Wei emerged as a key figure in East Asia’s experimental sound scene. Lin engaged in ethnographic fieldwork led by musicologist Lu ChuiKuan in TNUA between 1995–1996, focusing on Indigenous and Taoist musical traditions— He continued his academic pursuit at Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains in France (2000), exploring new media and the politics of perception. His 2012 book “Beyond Sound Art: Avant-Gardism, Sound Machines, and the Modernity of Hearing” became a seminal text in the sinophone discourse on sound and media art.

linchiwei.com

Mutable Scores: Embracing Non-Finality in Notation

Alexandre Sasset-Blouin | Université de Montréeal

In Western art music, a work is commonly understood as a discrete and final entity, instantiated through a score or fixed instructions that govern its recreation. Although various practices experiment with a score’s determinacy, few musicians have envisioned a work’s notation as a continuously evolving and perpetual process. Drawing primarily on an analysis of Lydia Goehr’s work-concept, this paper first examines how works are largely perceived as finished entities. It then presents Lauren Redhead’s iterative compositional approach as a case study of scores deliberately designed to resist finality. Building on this framework, the paper introduces the mutable score through the examination of a composition currently in development. The proposed model supports perpetual adaptation, reworking, and recontextualization, treating iterations not as derivatives but as active components of an ongoing compositional process and traceable records of the work’s evolution. The paper further considers how such iterations may be documented, preserved, and circulated to remain operative in subsequent realizations.

Alexandre Sasset-Blouin

Alexandre Sasset-Blouin is a composer, sound artist, and researcher based in Tiohtià:ke (Montreal). His work spans performance and installation, investigating sound through material processes, feedback systems, and spatialized environments. He is pursuing a master’s degree in composition and sound creation at the Université de Montréal. His research focuses on the ontology of musical works in relation to scoring practices, approaching music and notation as perpetually ongoing processes. Aesthetically, he engages harsh and distorted sound generated through synthesis and extreme processing. He is a member of the performative notation research team at the Université de Montréal’s Laboratoire formes • ondes and participates in a Université du Québec à Montréal research-creation project on how sonic objects inform organizational routines. He is a student member of CIRMMT and the Hexagram network.

sasset.ca

10:00am – 11:00am
paper session #10
Craig Pedersen | (re-)Defining the Poetic Text Score
Nicolaj Kirisits | Sound as score in architectural plans: apath-based notation workflow using ambisonics + 360° video
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(re-)Defining the Poetic Text Score

Craig Pedersen | Cowan University

Text scores emerged within post-1960s Experimental music as the musical score’s definition expanded beyond the representation of foreseeable or reproducible musical outcomes. Using language in place of other notations, text scores employed indeterminacy and openness to establish an acceptable range of possible realisations. While instructional text scores—those that relatively clearly indicate musical action—have been widely discussed, their more ambiguous, non-instructional counterparts have received comparatively little attention. This paper addresses this gap by proposing a redefinition of such works as poetic text scores, framing them not by the absence of instruction but through their ambiguity and poetic function. Drawing on examples from Fluxus-associated artists, Pauline Oliveros, the Wandelweiser collective, and contemporary experimental practice, the paper surveys a range of poetic text scores, categorising them according to word use, spatial layout, and thematic qualities. Building on post-Saussurean structuralist semiotics, the paper advances a model of the score as an object signifying acts in time, with the act of interpretation arising to answer the questions “which acts, and when?” This framework is applied first to instructional text scores, before turning to Roman Jakobson’s theory of the poetic function to clarify and account for the poetic text score’s identity as score.

Craig Pedersen

Craig Pedersen is a Canadian trumpet player, composer and improvisor living in Boorloo/Perth, Western Australia. He is constantly searching for expressive potentials, seeking a music that defies understanding and moves in unexplainable and unexpected ways. As an active and avid touring artist, he has played across Canada, in Asia, Australia, America and Mexico. Highlights of his work includes collaborations and/or performances with Toshimaru Nakamura, Tetuzi Akiyama, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Shinkan Tamaki, Manfred Werder, Pauline Oliveros, Roscoe Mitchell, Jean Derome, Joane Hetu, Anne-F Jacques, and many others. His book Trumpet Sound Effects was published in 2014 by Berklee Press, and his in-progress PhD is centred upon the interpretation of poetic text scores, soliciting input from Manfred Werder, Ryoko Akama, Heather Roche, Julián Galay, Gudinni Cortina, E Millar, Zhao Cong and Zhu Wenbo, Mark Molnar, Sage Harlow and many others.

Sound as score in architectural plans: apath-based notation workflow using ambisonics + 360° video

DI Nicolaj Kirisits | University of applied arts Vienna Institute, fine arts & media art, Department digital arts

Architecture is experienced in physical space but is represented as a non-temporal object in 2D plans, whereas sound is framed as a temporal phenomenon in the time– frequency domain. Bridging this divide requires conceiving architecture as event and sound as a spatial, architectural element. We propose a plan-centric notation that “folds” listening events along a walked path into the plan for re-enactment, comparison, and design discussion. Building on the Soundspace-Sequenz—an improvisational listening walk documented for later analysis—our method combines first-order Ambisonics (FOA) audio with 360° video. Python-based processing extracts descriptors (amplitude envelope, spectral complexity, tonal segments, onsets) and maps time to walked distance using video- assisted position checks. The resulting path-line is registered to the route and embedded in the plan; interpretive icon annotations (atmospheres, sound effects, soundmarks) are added manually under an explicit rule set. A case study in an urban public space shows how the plan- embedded score functions as a memory-stable record of listening and an actionable artifact for communicating sonic design concerns. Unlike static sound maps that merely locate sound, the notation documents listener– space interaction as constitutive of sonic reception.

Nicolaj Kirisits

Nicolaj Kirisits (*1967, Vienna) is an Austrian architect and sound artist. He studied architecture at the Vienna University of Technology and electronic and experimental music at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. Since 2019 he has been working on his PhD project, Notation of Soundscapes: How to Think Architecture Sonically, at the Vienna University of Technology. Since 2003 he has been a Senior Artist at the University of Applied Arts Vienna (Institute of Visual and Media Arts, Department of Digital Art), where he leads the SoundArtLab, focusing on sound in space and time-based media installations. His interactive sound installations have been presented internationally at festivals such as Ars Electronica (AT), SIGGRAPH (USA), FILE Festival (BRA), NIME (FR), NTTICC Tokyo (JP) and the Bienal de La Habana (CUB).

11:00am – 12:00pm
paper session #11
Eric Maestri | Sonic Scores Mimetic Behaviour: Two Case Studies
Gil Dori | Songs of Love and Death: The Act of Sound as Notation
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Sonic Scores Mimetic Behaviour: Two Case Studies

Eric Maestri | Sorbonne Université, Institut de recherche en musicologie (IReMus)

In this paper, I point out questions that have arisen from my practice of sonic scores. This music writing is based on sound. A sonic score is an aural notation that encodes, in a phonographic manner, a musical work in a sound file. By doing so, it places the sonic experience at the heart of musical notation. However, this approach also presents challenges and benefits in musical projects. Sonic scores expand and enhance the musical creativity of performers by freeing them from graphocentric approaches. They present musical pieces in a radically different way, offering an alternative perspective on notation and composition. Sonic scores can be used to coordinate musicians and provide a tangible experience with extended instrumental techniques in mixed music. In this paper, I will study the mimetic approach to the performance of sonic scores. I will examine the historical evolution of sonic scores and present an initial analysis of data collected during two sessions of performances of two sonic scores: Metaction and C’est de l’encre. I will use this experience to make a preliminary evaluation. The goal of this research is to understand the suggested conveyance mode of the proposed sonic scores and to consider them in a broader context.

Eric Maestri

Eric Maestri is composer and musicologist, Associate professor in contemporary music at Sorbonne University, Paris. He has composed for international groups and festivals and has published extensively about electronic and 21st-century music.

ericmaestri.eu

Songs of Love and Death: The Act of Sound as Notation

Gil Dori | ENTI-UB

Songs of Love and Death is a composition for voice and electronics, which revolves around vowel sounds - real and implied. It features a real-time graphic score, which uses mouth contour data to recreate the shapes of vowels on the screen. Although they are represented graphically, these recreated vowels imply the sound that is tied to each one of them. The performer sings the text, imitating the given vowel shapes, and thus reshaping the sounds of the sung text. Through that, the work explores unusual acoustic results that emerge from the contrast between the implied vowel sound and the text needed to be sung. This approach to action-based notation incorporates aspects of audio scores into a visual one. The paper describes the composition and performance of Songs of Love and Death, discussing this notion of implied sounds, or acts of sound, as the driving principle of the notation.

Gil Dori

Gil Dori is a composer, teacher, and co-founder of EyeHarp – the first accessible musical instrument that is played with the eyes. Gil teaches music technology, sound design, and composition at the College of New Interactive Technologies, University of Barcelona. As an artist and researcher, Gil is mostly interested in interactive electronic music, alternative notation, spectral procedures, and Jewish music. He holds a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from Arizona State University

gildori.com

12:00pm – 01:30pm
workshop #6 (Room D0263) and #7 (Room A0201) in parallel
Susanne Kogler, Nicolas Müller-Lorenz, Elisabeth Schimana and Barbara Neu #6 | You are the Sound // A Workshop on Listening and Mimesis
Giuseppe Silvi #7 | Inhabiting Vibration: Electromagnetic Feedback and Tetrahedral Thinking
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Bankettsaal

02:00pm – 03:00pm
paper session #12
Per Anders Nilsson and Palle Dahlstedt | Interactive Scores: Tasks and decisions in improvisation systems and open works
Grgur Savic | Visual Scores as Listening-Mediated Notation: A Practic-Based Case Study
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Interactive Scores: Tasks and decisions in improvisation systems and open works

Per Anders Nilsson and Palle Dahlstedt | Academy of Music and Drama, University of Gothenburg

This study investigates relationships and interactions between a performer and a score. This view implies a shift in focus, from the score to the act of interpreting and performing, and subsequently to the performer. A significant aesthetic conception is to regard the score as an artifact intended for players to interact with, rather than a means for personal expression per se. The musical context is first and foremost within the experimental music tradition in the post-World War II era. The theoretical framework consists of concepts from, e.g., John Cage and Cornelis Cardew, in addition to influences from the field of interaction design. To elucidate the subject matter, a limited number of musical works are discussed, including both classic pieces and original works. Finally, the paper concludes with some personal reflections on working with interactive scores.

Per Anders Nilsson

Per Anders Nilsson (1954) Professor Emeritus at the University of Gothenburg. Researcher, improvisor and composer. Studied saxophone and electronic music in the 80s at the University of Gothenburg. PhD at the University of Gothenburg 2011. Been a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley and Stanford University, selected in ICMC conferences and international music festivals. Nilsson works in the research project Entangled Musicianship, supported by the Swedish Research Council. Nilsson plays in several improvisation groups.

Palle Dahlstedt

Palle Dahlstedt (1971) Composer, sound artist, improviser and researcher. Has a PhD (Chalmers, 2004) in creative AI for composition and sound design. His research interest is the deep entanglement of art and advanced technology, developing new technologies for improvisation, composition and art. Head of subject in music and lecturer in composition at the Academy of Music and Drama (University of Gothenburg), Prof. of Interaction Design, Dept. of Computer Sci. and Eng., (Univ. of Gothenburg and Chalmers). Also Adjunct Prof. of Art & Technology, Aalborg University.

Visual Scores as Listening-Mediated Notation: A Practic-Based Case Study

Grgur Savić | Independent Researcher

This paper presents a practice-based analysis of a time-based visual score, accompanied by extensive performance notes specifying symbol execution. The digitally animated notation employs relational, temporal, and gestural cues organized along a moving horizontal timeline, regulating entrances, transitions, and pauses without prescribing fixed pitches or durations. Performers translate visual information into sound through attentive listening and ensemble negotiation. The study examines how this approach fosters interpretive flexibility, coordination, and collective awareness, highlighting complementary perspectives to audio-centric notation. Pedagogical implications are discussed, illustrating how visual scores can support rehearsal, performance, and ensemble training while foregrounding listening, collaboration, and interpretive responsibility.

Grgur Savić

Grgur Savić works across the mediums of sound, visual art, and technology. His practice spans performance, composition, and material transformation, with a focus on deconstructing the saxophone to explore resonance, vibration, and the tangible presence of sound. Working with graphic scores, he investigates visual–sonic translation and real-time interaction, as in his project [air>coded], which stages a dialogue between human fragility and digital precision, questioning authorship, perception, and agency: Who leads, and who listens? His intermedial practice transforms found objects and discarded texts into hybrid sound–text works, reflecting on communication, authorship, and the social dimensions of art. Across formats, his work listens for how sound, text, and objects can be coded, re-coded, and ultimately re-heard. His work has been featured at international experimental music festivals. Based in Berlin since 2015, he is an active member in the Echtzeitmusik scene.

03:00pm – 04:00pm
paper session #13
Djordje Marković | Prescriptive Notation as Performative Interface
James Aylward | Playing the Action, Hearing the Result: Prescriptive Notation and Bassoon Technique in Aaron Cassidy's 25 April '05
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Prescriptive Notation as Performative Interface

Djordje Marković | PhD student, Academy of Arts, University of Novi Sad, Serbia

This paper approaches musical notation not as a representational system for sound, but as a prescriptive interface that organizes instrumental action and conditions the emergence of musical events. Drawing on the performative turn in music, improvisation studies, and Gilles Deleuze’s concept of virtuality, it argues that increased prescriptivity often intensifies rather than reduces interpretative openness. By examining prescriptive layers embedded within classical notation – such as articulation, ornamentation, and instrumental instructions – the paper challenges the opposition between descriptive and prescriptive notation. Prescriptivity is understood as operating below the level of sound, at the level of embodied action, allowing sonic outcomes to remain contingent and immanent to performance. The argument is grounded in the author’s compositional practice, with examples from trumpet notation that employ minimally extended classical notation to prescribe complex actions while resisting stable sonic representation. The paper concludes by proposing prescriptive notation as a catalyst for musical becoming rather than a blueprint for musical objects.

Djordje Marković

Djordje Marković is a composer, researcher, and Teaching Assistant at the Academy of Arts in Novi Sad, where he is comple?ng his doctoral studies (DMA). His work explores composi?on, phenomenology, and the ontology of musical nota?on. He studied composi?on and philosophy, and pursued postgraduate studies with Beat Furrer at KUG Graz. His music has been performed interna?onally by ensembles such as Klangforum Wien and London SinfonieOa, and presented at fes?vals including impuls (Graz) and Rainy Days (Luxembourg).

Playing the Action, Hearing the Result:
Prescriptive Notation and Bassoon Technique in Aaron Cassidy's 25 April '05

James Aylward | Edith Cowan University

The expansion of extended instrumental techniques has increasingly exposed the limitations of traditional Western musical notation, particularly its prioritization of pitch and rhythm over timbre, physical action, and performance process. This paper examines these limitations through a case study of Aaron Cassidy’s bassoon solo 25 April ’05 (2025), focusing on the composer’s use of a highly prescriptive tablature-based notational system. Drawing on Charles Seeger’s distinction between descriptive and prescriptive notation, as well as subsequent discourse on mixed notational systems, the article situates Cassidy’s work within broader debates surrounding the communication of instrumental technique. Cassidy’s score separates the activities of the breath apparatus and the fingers across two staves, employing graphical notation, colour-coding, and tablature to prioritize physical and choreographic action over fixed sonic outcomes. Through detailed analysis of this system, the paper argues that Cassidy’s notation creates a sophisticated method of communication that actively engages the performer while creating conditions for instability and variability. The notation stimulates the exploration of transitive and unpredictable sounds intrinsic to the bassoon. While acknowledging the practical challenges posed by such a system, the article suggests that 25 April ’05 offers a compelling model for rethinking notation as a generative framework, expanding contemporary approaches to instrumental technique and composer–performer interaction.

James Aylward

(b. 1979) is a Netherlands-based bassoonist known particularly for his dedicated engagement with contemporary music. He has performed regularly with leading new music ensembles including Ensemble Musikfabrik and Elision Ensemble and has appeared in numerous international concerts and festivals. His other collaborations include performances with Ensemble Modern, Klangforum Wien, Ensemble Mosaik, Remix Ensemble, a.o. Since October 2025, James is Professor of Bassoon at the Prins Claus Conservatorium in Groningen. He is also completing a PhD at Edith Cowan University, focusing on alternative approaches to extended techniques. His earlier research into microtonality in bassoon repertoire was undertaken during his Master’s studies at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam (2007). From 2001 to 2005, he was Associate Principal Bassoon of the West Australian Symphony Orchestra (WASO), and he remains an active guest performer with orchestras across the Netherlands and Europe.

04:00pm – 05:00pm
workshop #8 (Room A0201) and #9 (Room D0263) in parallel
Sandeep Bhagwati #8 | Performing an Audioscore for (Un)trained Singers
Sonia Allori #9 | Live Descriptive Captioning as Musical Notation in Improvised Performance
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Josef Haydn-Saal

06:00pm – 07:00pm
keynote
Arnie Cox | On the roles of mimetic motor imagery and action in musical composition, performance, consumption, and aesthetic evaluation
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07:30pm – 08:15pm
black page orchestra
Ann Rosén | Between Us
Solomiya Moroz | Phytogenic Score: Rhyzomes
Lindsay Vickery | Little (Grey) Wing
Cat Hope | Vibrissae - For violin, double bass and electronics
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08:30pm – open end TENOR dinner

Fri 09:00pm – Sun 02:00pm
Poster Exhibition Foyer Klangtheater
Veronika Reutz Drobnić | Visual Complexity and Cognitive Load in Animated Graphic Scores: Evidence from Biometric and Performance Data
Andres Gutierrez Martinez and Chiara Percivati | Timbre as score. A machine-listening instrument for HCI performance of bass clarinet multiphonics.
Claire Paul | Toward a Psychoacoustic System of Graphic and Performance Scores: Improvisation, Healing Frequencies, and Embodied Sound
David M. Weigl and Werner Goebl | Machine-readable representations of music notation as digital music research infrastructure
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