„Sprach|Raum – eine Annäherung an die Musique anecdotique von Luc Ferrari“

in Electroacoustic Music: Technologies, Aesthetics, and Theories – a Musicological Challenge, Die blaue Eule: Essen 2008.

„Entdifferenzierung“

in Böhme-Mehner/Wolf (Ed.), Musik zwischen ästhetischer Interpretation und soziologischem Verständnis, Die blaue Eule: Essen, 2006: 175-181.

„EARS II – Time for a new Approach to electroacoustic Music”

Proceedings of SysMus08, Graz, Austria.

Background.
Contemporary music, in particular electroacoustic music, is not very well known in today’s society. Musicians and researchers should have confronted issues related to making this corpus of music accessible to a wider audience; however, there are only very few projects available that explain electroacoustic music to non-specialists.
The PhD project “EARS II” focuses on this as well as on detailed research about the fundamental concepts of electroacoustic music. At the Music, Technology and Innovation Research Centre there are two existent projects that are related to and will be integrated into the research: The original EARS project (ElectroAcoustic Resource Site, www.ears.dmu.ac.uk), which provides academic information for researchers in the realm of electroacoustic music, and the Intention/Reception (I/R) project (Weale 2006), which has investigated and shown ways of presenting and introducing electroacoustic music to new audiences thus demonstrating its potential accessibility.

Aims.
The goal of the PhD project is to develop a web-based resource for children (11-14 year olds in the first instance) with an accompanying curriculum based on the current website EARS I. EARS II will introduce and explain the main concepts of electroacoustic music to inexperienced listeners using relevant multimedia tools and applying different forms of navigation based on the learning situation and the ability of the user. It will offer diagnostic information to users and will also involve user-generated feedback and tagging systems. It will call on elements related to music appreciation (I/R project) and creativity (new ‘Sound Organiser’ software). The research will focus on the understanding of concepts related to electroacoustic music making and associated research.

Main contribution.
In these times of far-reaching isolation of a great deal of contemporary arts within society, the project EARS II is designed to help close the gap which has increased for the better part of a century.
The I/R project demonstrated that by introducing children and inexperienced listeners to the basics of electroacoustic music carefully, one important result is a better understanding and appreciation of this music. The implications for EARS II are: the need to address children in particular is important; they are not only often more curious but also more willing to learn about new realms. Furthermore, it is easier for this focus group to accept new ideas, as they do not have necessarily deeply formed foundational assumptions about what music is.
In this paper the goals of the project and further details concerning its content and method will be presented. Furthermore the employed innovative learning methods will be introduced together with the learning outcomes for this web resource.

Implications.
The outcome is to have a website which can be used as a stand-alone learning tool as well as a classroom-based learning facility. Most projects, which introduce children to contemporary music, do not include electroacoustic music. Furthermore, no other project exists currently in which this integrated holistic approach involving learning, listening and making is offered in a similar manner.