SaS Wien Modern

Like many fields and disciplines in 21st-century societies, new music—along with its institutions, key figures, and practices—can be viewed as an ecosystem of its own, in which artistic principles are just as relevant as competitiveness and economic considerations. Against this backdrop, listening is the focus of our interest.

In conversation with the composers and the audience, we will reflect on our listening experiences. Our hypothesis is that the specific listening stance adopted by composers, performers, and musicians encompasses a mimetic dimension - a specific form of imitation (mimesis) - that is relevant to the novel character of the pieces and constitutive of their specific effect on the audience. All participants in the artistic event are invited to listen and immerse themselves in the respective musical landscapes. The goal is to develop a new attitude that helps break down entrenched structures and one-sided ways of perceiving, acting, and thinking.

By discussing the implications of this aesthetic concept in a broad forum, we aim to establish a communicative method of analysis that does justice to these innovative artistic practices: First, we aim to initiate an interdisciplinary dialogue that complements traditional musicological analysis, which is typically based solely on musical notation and does not extend beyond the boundaries of the discipline; second, we seek to break open the intra-disciplinary discourse on modern music by involving various key figures in a more inclusive socio-aesthetic and political debate.

The discussion covers the following questions, among others:

• Does the use of audio scores alter the aesthetic experience?

• What differences can be observed in the individual perceptions of the musicians, the composers/performers, and the audience?

• How does the use of audio scores affect the understanding of the work?

• How does this affect a potentially wordless but decipherable “meaning” that could be conveyed through the music?

• Within this context, does the perception of the piece’s form change compared to works that use a traditional score?

• Which elements are crucial to the success of a performance?

• How is success defined in this context by the various participants?

• How does this changed framework affect traditional role models, hierarchies, or other unspoken norms and rules in today’s music business?

• And could this even have political implications that extend beyond the purely artistic realm?

In 2018 and 2019, I was invited to participate in the TENOR (Technologies for Music Notation and Representation) conference. I was pleased to observe that an international audio score community, featuring a wide variety of approaches, is gradually emerging. However, sound as a score—or the so-called audio score—as well as the implications of its associated aesthetics and performance practices, remain a relatively unexplored field.

In the 1950s, Schaeffer founded the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) to compile a catalog of sound objects and their specifications, known as “solfège.” The results of this groundbreaking research led to new approaches to compositional methods, with a focus on the medium of sound and the act of listening. Advances in technology have enabled composers of electronic music to use the medium of sound—as opposed to written notation—as a process-oriented score for musicians.

airborne extended and the SaS Composer Lab

From May 2025 to February 2026, the SaS Composer Lab provided a platform for compositional experiments with audio scores and their interpretation, created a space for exploring the methods and concepts underlying these audio scores, and offered a forum for analyzing and discussing the concept of mimesis from the perspective of composers and performers. The Lab was preceded by an internationally oriented open call, from which six composers were selected to participate: Amy Brandon (CA), Luc Döbereiner (A/DE), Carlos Iturralde (MX), Sofía Matus Cancino (MX/US), Ursula Winterauer (A), and Dustin Zorn (DE/A). In addition, the research team—Elisabeth Schimana, Susanne Kogler, Barbara Maria Neu, and Nicolas Müller-Lorenz—the invited experts Margarethe Maierhofer-Lischka (performance) and Sandeep Bhagwati (composition), as well as the members of the ensemble airbore extended (Elena Gabbrielli, Sonja Leipold, Caroline Mayrhofer, and Tina Žerdin) also took part. Through online meetings and a hybrid workshop at the mdw (University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna) in July 2025, the compositions presented at wien modern were developed through a process of discourse, alongside a reflective exploration of the concept of mimesis in the context of creating audio scores.

All of the works by airborne extended performed at wien modern during the concert evenings were composed during the SaS Composer Lab. For many, this will be their first time meeting in person!

The Black Page Orchestra and the Artistic and Psychoacoustic Analysis of Audio Scores

The fundamental sonic characteristics of the composition Tipping Points served in the preliminary phase as an experimental setup for the psychoacoustic and artistic analysis of the process of interpreting an audio score. The setting for the experimental setup was developed by psychoacousticians Piotr Majdak and Katharina Pollack, performer and project collaborator Barbara Maria Neu, sound engineer Peter Venus, and myself. The first tests took place at the Institute for Acoustic Research in June 2025. Tipping Points is based on an audio score I generated live and, in the context of interpreting this score, examines the perception of a) timbre changes, b) pitch discrimination, c) pattern recognition, and the segmentation of frequency bands.

In February 2026, the musicians of the Black Page Orchestra—Elnaz Behkam (piano), Florian Fennes (saxophone), Irene Frank (cello), Igor Gross (percussion), Anna Guggenberger (tuba), Aleksa Marinković (bassoon), and Fani Vovoni (violin) arrived individually at the studio at the mdw to take part in this experimental setup.

For this project, I generated three audio scores—each approximately three minutes long—tailored to the respective instrument and the research questions. The audio score and the performance were recorded, and these recordings were played back to the musicians through headphones immediately after each sequence. The musicians then provided live commentary on the playback while listening, and this was recorded on video.

The resulting data now serves as the basis both for the psychoacoustic analyses by Piotr Majdak and Katharina Pollack, as well as for my own artistic analysis from the perspective of a composer. It’s fantastic material: spontaneous, emotional, critical, and revealing—especially when it comes to the limits of what’s technically possible on the instrument—but also quite funny!

Based on this data, Piotr Majdak and Katharina Pollack are developing a model for distinguishing timbres. My analyses are incorporated into the composition Tipping Points.