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Paper Session 1a: History of Computer Music

May 11 @ 9:00 am - 10:30 am

Three papers will be presented and discussed:

 

Hyunmook Lim: “The History of Japanese Electroacoustic Music for Piano from the Perspective of Media Genealogy”

This paper examines the history of compositions for piano and electronics in Japan through the lens of media genealogy. While the development of modern Japanese electronic music emerged nearly in parallel with its European counterparts, it has often been perceived as lacking a distinctive trend or unified stylistic coherence, unlike the established traditions of France’s Musique concrète or Germany’s Elektronische Musik. To address this, the author categorizes the historically inconsistent
trajectory of Japanese electronic music by focusing on works for piano and electronics, tracing the genealogy of specific media that have emerged within the Japanese context. In response to the ICMC2026 theme, “Innovation, Translation, Participation,” this study provides a detailed analysis of technological innovation through media genealogies, offers a new translation of this historical narrative, and explores the processes of artistic participation that have shaped Japan’s electronic music history.

Paulo C. Chagas: “Beyond Execution: Unrealizability and the Ontology of Sound in Computer Music”
This paper proposes an ontological reorientation of computer music grounded in the concept of unrealizability. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s notion of potentiality without act, it argues that dominant paradigms of electroacoustic and computer music have historically privileged realization, execution, and operability as the primary conditions of sonic being. From early studio practices at the GRM and WDR to the consolidation of computer music as an executable, code-based discipline, sound has largely been understood as something that exists in order to be realized. Against this background, the paper proposes to examine a series of practices that destabilize the primacy of execution. Practices such as granular synthesis, live electronic and interactive systems, and machine-learning-based processes foreground forms of sonic potentiality that cannot be fully individuated, predicted, or exhausted by realization, thereby suggesting unrealizability not as a limitation but as
a constitutive dimension of contemporary computer music. By framing sound as a field of suspended potential rather than a command to be executed, the paper advances an alternative ontology in which listening becomes a mode of use rather than consumption. This perspective invites a reconsideration of compositional agency, technological apparatuses, and the political implications of sound practices beyond execution, emphasizing openness, contingency, and inoperativity as critical resources for computer music today.
Andrea Agostini: “Computer-Aided Composition: A Retrospective and Prospective Outlook”

Computer-aided composition was established as an autonomous discipline, distinct from the seemingly more general concept of computer composition, in the 1980s. Since then, it has prompted the development of dedicated software tools and specific compositional practices and attitudes. In spite of this, a definition of what computer-aided composition actually is and, subsequently, a retrospective outlook on its past evolution and a prospective one on its possible futures has seldom if ever been attempted. Also, while development and adoption of new tools has been uninterrupted through the decades, theoretical reflection was especially thriving until the late 1990s or early 2000s, and has lost vitality since. In this article, we shall examine past literature in order to trace a historical overview of the term, implicitly outlining a tentative definition of it and following through the most significant developments of computer-aided composition and its associated toolsets; attempt a necessarily partial overview of how it is practically understood and adopted today; and sketch a personal and incomplete wishlist of what the term could come to mean in some desirable future.

 

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