Speculative Sound Synthesis
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This special issue of the ECHO Journal is a collaboration between the ECHO team and the artistic research project Speculative Sound Synthesis, hosted at the Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics at the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz.
The project—and this special issue—focuses on the complex interplay between technological capabilities, instruments, and aesthetically driven decisions and processes in the practice of sound synthesis. Historically, technological advances in electronic and computer music have opened new creative possibilities while simultaneously introducing constraints, habits, and standardized practices that have significantly shaped artistic practices in this field. Rather than viewing the entanglement of practices as merely problematic, the Speculative Sound Synthesis project proposes a renegotiation of these usually unquestioned interactions.
Our approach emerges from an artistic practice-one where aesthetic concerns and technological development intermingle, where different methods, modes of working, and thinking about sound coexist in a continuous exchange. We conceive this situation as an oscillation—a movement alternating between two poles: artistic or aesthetic praxis on one side, technological or scientific praxis on the other. By praxis we mean theoretically-conscious action, as distinguished from unreflective practice.
This editorial outlines the conceptual framework guiding both the project and this special issue, exploring how speculation operates as both method and artistic stance in this domain.
Sound synthesis is a field where the artistic and the technological necessarily meet. In our practice, we aim to see synthesis not as a tool for composition, but as composition itself.
The etymological kinship between these terms is revealing: "composition" derives from Latin componere, while "synthesis" comes from ancient Greek synthithenai—both referring to the act of putting elements together. Despite their shared origin,these two words are used with different meanings, particularly in the musical context. "Composition" has come to describe the rational, time-detached process of conceiving and notating music—fixing it in a form readable by others, particularly performing musicians. "Sound synthesis," conversely, refers to various technical processes of sound generation either by means of computation or through analogue circuitry. Composition thus often connotes an intellectual, formal act, while synthesis remains bound to applied, practical and performative actions. A distinction which also reflects a problematic separation between intellectual and physical labor, where the creation of music (the compositional process) is detached from its performance and its reception.
One central aim of the Speculative Sound Synthesis project is to question the sharpness of this differentiation and the boundaries it constructs. Composition and synthesis, though different, describe modes of working and thinking that are, at moments and to varying degrees integral to artistic work. We postulate that there is a continuum of decisions, a space in which both modes interact, and see paths joining them-trajectories moving through different shades of either the one or the other, of abstraction, form, material, instrument, computation, performance, whichever personal meaning these words may have for the reader.
And so, while synthesis often begins at the micro-level of sound, we extend the choices taken at this level to a structural, macro-level. We understand synthesis processes equally as generators of waveforms and as compositional structures themselves: open, evolving, speculative systems in which sound generation and compositional decision are no longer clearly separable, but unfold as one.
We look at composition in a broader sense, as the act of choosing and combining sonic and non-sonic materials. This establishes previously unthought relations: aggregates of disparate elements, sounds, algorithms and the cultural history these carry, mathematical or architectural spaces, fictional narratives or musical instruments, creating new aesthetic spaces. Synthesis, in this scenario, emerges from composition—something that exceeds the sum of individual parts. Perception then performs the synthesis of different elements and thus allowing for novel Gestalts to appear.
A Speculative Synthesis is thus, neither merely a method of combining discrete sonic elements or a technical manipulation of waveforms or algorithmic shaping of signals. Speculative Synthesis instead creates a conceptual space for thinking about, perceiving, and manipulating sound that transcends specific techniques, while allowing them to coexist and influence one another.
We perceive two forces, an opening, and a closing one. Our artistic practice is characterized by a questioning attitude that widens the range of experiences, shifting perception of the materials and concepts we operate with-opening up closed boxes and seeking connections that break through well-defined boundaries. Our technological methods, conversely, move in the opposite direction: they involve establishment of control mechanisms, repeatability, isomorphisms, closures, and processes of elimination converging toward singular accepted interpretations. When returning our discussion about synthesis and composition, “technological habits” tend toward a definition and a separation of the two, while a truly experimental artistic praxis would look inside accepted meanings, question and find ways to reconnect them, to overcome differences. In Speculative Sound Synthesis we understand these forces as two co-existing poles or two gravitational wells. There is a space between these behaviors, one that can be traveled back and forth while working with sound synthesis as we understand it. Oscillating freely between them, toying with differentiating and opening, we alternately draw unthought connections and construct new boundaries. This is the central speculative method in the project. It is a destabilizing movement, allowing implicit assumptions to become visible and to question established practices, allowing new approaches to emerge.
We adopt a radically experimental and exploratory attitude towards sound art, computer music, electronic music, and signal processing. Rather than accepting already-developed standards or tools for composition or sound synthesis, we take a critical stance; in this, speculation is our method.
Our understanding of speculation stems directly from the philosopher and physicist Alfred North Whitehead, who writes:
"[Speculation] starts from the ground of particular observation; it makes a flight in the thin air of imaginative generalization; and it again lands for renewed observation rendered acute by rational interpretation"(Whitehead, 2010, p. 5).
Here, speculation is something performed, something that must be done, rather than a process resulting in a sufficient, self-contained output. It is a process where experience lies at the very center of the speculative movement—integral to the process's start and necessary for its conclusion.
Whitehead's tripartite structure reveals speculation's distinctive character. It begins with observation, grounded in particular experience. It then takes a "leap of imagination"—a flight enabling exploration without predetermined aims or functional pretexts (we do this to obtain that). Yet speculation is not merely aimless exploration: Whitehead's final movement speaks of a "return," a coming back to ground, to observation and rationalization, a putting back into context. Speculation departs, travels, and flies, but then comes "back."
This last step—the moment of observation—reconstructs the path freely taken during exploratory "flight.” Unexplored, unthought regions may be reached during this free exploration, unbound by logic or predetermined narratives. But it is the final step, the step of observation, that reconstructs the path to known territory. This step makes one particular observation available for re-performance, description, communication, and sharing with others. It makes experiences gained during imaginative flight available by reconnecting them to the present situation.
Whitehead offers a different kind of narrative from common methods of induction and deduction, where method follows each step of scientific endeavor, ensuring and conserving rigor and logic throughout. Speculation allows a throw into the unknown, into the void, postponing rationalization and observation to a later point. In some ways, it is the contrary mechanism to common technological and scientific practices, in which the aim is exposed first, with method then serving to find the way to obtain it.
Speculation, therefore, is for us a liberation from the constraints of scientific, technological, and artistic practices that play within well-accepted categories and genres. It is a way to overcome situations seen as insufficient or unsatisfactory; speculation offers a method driven by imagination, exploration, change, and experience.
Another concept central to Speculative Sound Synthesis is that of potentiality, particularly as understood by Herbert Brün in his essay "Music and Information and Communication and Chaos and…" Brün describes his idea of novelty and defines what constitutes "new music." He characterizes "new music" as the "unheardof: […] That which must yet be attributed to sound and music. […]That which is not recognizable and which therefore could not possibly have any meaning"—a work of sound containing something"independent of existing conventions."
In opposition to many contemporaries, Brün rejects the idea that truly novel art is a work that communicates a message. Communication implies that a message coding/decoding process is shared between communicating parties, sender and receiver. New music would then be reduced to understanding a message or symbol sequence relying on shared embedding that would not allow genuine novelty to emerge. Rather, new music manifests a new system of reference—one that extends what currently exists and allows for meaning lying outside present systems of decoding or understanding.
Communication and understanding are therefore, for Brün, not the right terms for speaking of new music. He writes: "it is a mistake to request the listener to understand a contemporary work of art. Instead, the work of new music should extend the present moment of experience, the moment when and where […] tomorrow's language and tomorrow's meaningful past is being created." Brün's position is thus utterly progressive, future-oriented, and speculative—preoccupied with overcoming or extending the present situation by relentlessly searching for "new communicative potential."
We understand our speculations as such instances of new communicative potential—moments in which currently experienceable phenomena lie utterly outside given boundaries of what is accepted or understood. It is a moment that leaves one "speechless," a moment as much devoid of immediate meaning and understanding as it is filled with potentiality and possibilities for works of sound synthesis yet to be composed.
This orientation toward potentiality rather than communication, toward the extension of present experience rather than the transmission of understood messages, guides the artistic research presented in this special issue. The contributions in this issue embody these principles in diverse ways, each exploring how sound synthesis can operate as a speculative practice—one that enact the oscillating we have described: moving between technological and aesthetic poles, that takes imaginative flights from grounded observations, and that reaches toward the unheard-of as a means of extending our present moment of experience.
In this section, we present three experiences with speculative sound synthesis—each reflecting a different approach. These fragments are not illustrations of concepts, but expose how each of us thinks indifferent media: text, audio, and image each serve as arguments themselves.
Each fragment directs its speculative attention differently. Some expose aesthetic dimensions, others question technological assumptions; each embodies a distinct understanding of what sound synthesis can be. These fragments emphasize openness as the core of speculative practice: openness toward aims, openness toward influences from others and foreign concepts, and openness to how each work may be read, understood, and reinterpreted. We invite you to compose your own connections through their similarities, tensions, and differences.
I would like to speak about an experience.
What you're listening to is a binaural recording from an afternoon in the CUBE studio at the IEM. Twelve low-frequency oscillators—metronomes producing a "clack" each cycle—are each projected through one loudspeaker on the CUBE's lower ring at ear level. A microphone in the center picks up their collective sound and feeds it back, disturbing each oscillator's phase. Through this feedback, the oscillators listen to and influence one another, becoming a coupled dynamical system—what's known as a Kuramoto model.1
The central parameter here is the coupling constant: a value controlling how much each oscillator affects and is affected by the others—how exposed each is to its environment. By varying this parameter, I could explore radically different behaviors and, more significantly, radically different experiences of space.
When coupling is zero, each oscillator runs independently. Though their phases differ, their frequencies match, creating a constant spatial rhythm. Despite the system's complexity—twelve separate sources—the ear grasps its static nature almost immediately. The rhythm won't change. Space opens clearly: each metronome occupies a distinct direction, sharply separable. Yet this clarity has a kind of death—the space is understood, closed, inert.
When coupling is strong, the oscillators quickly fall into unison, the synchronize. Space collapses entirely. Sitting at the center, all metronomes arriving simultaneously, I experienced flatness, closure, the disappearance of spatiality itself.
But what happened inbetween—during the synchronization process—was truly inspiring.
As each oscillator slowly, tentatively adjusts its phase in response to external influence, an ever-shifting spatial movement emerges. Apparent swirls of mutually interacting pulses. Temporary groupings that appear and dissolve—sometimes into chaos, sometimes reemerging as localized spatial presences. A continuous, almost imperceptible deviation spreading through the whole space, which is now somehow alive.This behavior emerges from the system's precise formulation, yet its particular appearance is essentially tied to my perception. System and aesthetic are entangled.
This in-between state—this suspension—became the object of my fascination. The synchronized endpoint is predictable, even inevitable. So I pushed against its teleological pull, searching for the lowest possible coupling value, extending the process as long as I could. I was trying to remain in the suspension of the in-between, to delay arrival, to stay in flight.
That afternoon profoundly changed how I experience space and its connection with time. Looking back, I see how many works and thoughts have originated from those hours spent suspended between order and chaos, between clarity and confusion, in a space that refused to settle—that remained, stubbornly speculative, potential.
Synchronizing/Oscillating at the threshold between control and chaos.
A crucial experience for me was playing networked improvisations in a quartet formed by Ji Youn Kang, Luc Döbereiner, David Pirrò and myself. Inspired by the pioneering computer network ensemble The Hub, we each conceived and built a digital (or in Kang's case, half digital and half analog) instrument that could receive sound input, while also outputting sound to be received by the others. Each instrument was influenced by these inputs in ways we individually composed.
I have always put emphasis on creating structure and form in my work, emphasizing time and timing. I wanted to create an instrument that would somehow be able to reflect this while also being able to remain influenced by the others. My instrument was not able to make sound on its own. Instead, with it I was able to read in the signals, either of all of them, two or one, select moments or grains from what was played before, mix them together, choose the moment in which to play them back, and read and write them out at different speeds. I was thus acting as a sort of memory for the group, bringing back certain moments that had happened before, or playing variations of them.
One central aspect of this network is that no player is able to fully control their sound output. While we all had some amount of agency on the sonic outcome, many aspects only emerged as a complex interplay of the different processes coming together and influencing each other, creating an only partially controllable sonic network. There are certain aspects of traditional instrumental improvisation in this, while other aspects differ from it. In these structured improvisations, listening is the key to playing together. Listening to the emergent structures of one’s own instrument and the system as a whole; listening for the influence of the own actions (for example, parameter changes) on the other instruments. Finding a pacing, a mutual understanding of time, dynamics, and rate of change. This could oftentimes only be approximated, there could be no certainty as to how the systems would react, or what sounds would appear at their inputs. Rather than perceiving direct cause and effect, we developed a feeling for the large-scale behavior of the instruments, the important thing was to get an experience with the larger scale of the behavior of the instruments, and how they would respond to certain types of inputs. This feeling is described by Dieter Mersch as “experimental sense”.
The indirect, open approach to agency also meant that visible actions or gestures didn’t necessarily correspond to sonic outputs. My experience while playing and my perception of the sonic results is however that I felt a certain liveness in the sound and its behavior itself, one that was detached from the players, that was within the system. It was with this experience that I had a feeling I could grasp what speculative sound synthesis could potentially be. What could on one hand be described as a lack of agency of the human players, could also be seen as an enhanced agency of the system, that consists of small parts working together. What might happen in the sound could be anticipated and guided, but never completely foreseen.
Speculation can be like opening up a space for thought. A temporary space in which the conditions for thinking shift. Certain questions become thinkable and changed physical conditions lead to new questions. Science fiction is often where such reconfigurations occur for me.
Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life” deals with time, starting from language. A linguistic form reorganizes the temporal experience. The aliens who have landed on Earth speak and write everything in a single moment. They know the end of the sentence at the beginning; already knowing the future in the present. Time is not linear. It is simultaneous. It ceases to unfold and instead arrives all at once.
What happens to music in a world where time as we know it does not exist, as Ted Chiang writes in his short story or Carlo Rovelli in his paper “Forget time” (Rovelli 2009)? Music is dependent on time. It extends over time, unfolding linearly in relation to time. It requires succession, decay, anticipation. Even the most static drone depends on duration. To imagine sound in a temporality without before/after is to ask what sensory and cognitive infrastructures must be reconfigured. Would music cease to be temporal altogether, becoming instead a spatial object?
In his series “weiss / weisslich” (white / whitish) from 1986 and 1996, and in particular in "Weiss/Weisslich 22", Peter Ablinger created a work that follows this thought. As Scheib explains it, “Ablinger had been looking for a method of how to transform time from a linear experience into a momentary or maybe aimless/formless one.” (Scheib n.d.) Yet, Ablinger's work still maintains a linear relationship to time. The work has a duration of 40 seconds. As long as there is a duration, we would need a listener for whom “moment” is not a point but a field. A listener with the ability to listen to a duration all at once. What would music have to be for us not to experience it as linear? Punctual? The entire work in a single moment, and the brain has the ability to grasp this moment in its entirety?
Conversely, if a piece extended long enough for its beginning to dissolve in memory, duration might collapse into a kind of perpetual present. The work is so long that one has already forgotten that it has a beginning and an end, and one can grasp the entirety of the music in every moment. Hasn’t the linearity of time then dissolved in perception as well?
Speculation operates here as an investigative method. One that expands the conceptual and material conditions under which art and artistic research can produce knowledge.
In “Tower of Babylon,” Chiang develops a cosmology in which the Earth is not a sphere but a stamped cylinder: a surface whose beginning and end lie adjacent, even though they appear distant when unrolled onto paper. This shift in topology destabilizes familiar notions of space. Space shifts, you can move directly from end to beginning, creating a loop.
Loops are, of course, nothing new in music. Mostly they are treated as simple repetitions, although there are speculations about loops, such as one that Shuoxin Tan and Joseph Baader did in their examination of the Möbius strip. But Chiang’s rolled topology invites a different imagination. The beginning and end can always be redefined. Where the loop “begins” is not a fixed truth but choice – by the composer, the listener or the technologies that mediate the sound. Consider the listener. The longer they hear this loop, the more the boundary between beginning and end will blur. It is also up to the listeners to decide whether they want to change the loop they hear and, for example, think of a different beginning.
If the loop is a stamped roll, then each playback is an act of printing: selecting an excerpt from a potentially infinite surface. A shifted excerpt becomes a traversal across a topology. What becomes possible if the loop is treated not as a unit of time but as a navigable landscape? What if the material – field recordings, synthesized tones, environmental noise – reshapes the perceptual edges of the loop so that beginning and end cease to be relevant?
How can I, as a composer, constantly change the beginning and end of a loop? How can I further develop this analogy of excerpts from a loop in my compositions? Speculation here is not simply about what new forms could sound like, but about how compositional practice changes when the workspace itself is reimagined. What tools, notations, or listening habits must be transformed to let loops behave like surfaces among composer, system and listener?
No final answers appear. The loop, like Chiang’s stamped Earth, offers itself as a site where boundaries can be redefined, displaced or erased altogether. The speculation lies in following these redefinitions to see what new modes of making and listening become possible.
The contributions that follow explore speculative sound synthesis through multiple entry points—each enacting the oscillation between technological and aesthetic poles from different starting points, practices, and artistic perspectives.
Luca Spanedda, in his "Emergent Behaviors in Sound Synthesis," traces how chaotic, complex adaptive systems develop behaviors that exceed compositional control—synthesis itself becomes an exploratory speculative practice where new models arise from the system's own unfolding. Tom Mudd's "Following the Material" engages dynamical systems that resist reduction to controllable parameters—to pure functions—systems that demand to be respected in their dynamic condition, to be interacted with, to be followed. Ludvig Elblaus and Gerhard Eckel, in “utrumque”, present feedback instruments in which space, acoustics, architecture, and presence all become interconnected elements in a site-specific generative instrument—an instrument that exceeds the temporal frame of its performance, in which past, present, and future become entangled in the artists' practice.
Instruments may become unstable, oscillating points of potential departure. For Thomas Grill, Angélica Castelló, Patrick Lechner, Marco Döttlinger, and Arthur Flexer in "Black Box Music," their technological instruments are part of a functional-affective relation network, where between resistance and resonance resides the potential for machines and humans to mutually transform one another. In "Peaks, Valleys and Troughs," Chiara Percivati and Andrés Gutiérrez Martínez navigate the incompressible space between symbolic notation, compositional strategies, analysis, and the performance of multiphonics on the bass clarinet—in their work, this becomes a potential space of mutable resonances.
Synthesis may become a more-than-human assemblage or narration. In "Proxies," Alejandra María Pérez Núñez explores how circuits, ferments, radio links, solar triggers, and errors participate in a speculative fabulation—synthesis becoming not signal-shaping but composition of more-than-human relations, prehensions in Whitehead's terms, reaching toward ecological thought, care, and response. Mia Windsor's "Muta: material-driven sound synthesis in a mutable feedbackinstrument"—an assemblage of materials, feedback loops, and algorithmic transformations—operates as dynamic ecology, grounding speculative synthesis in contingent, improvised couplings.
Technological limitations or failures present unheard possibilities. In "Noise Re(in)duction," Nico Daleman misuses noise-canceling algorithms, treating their acoustic leftovers as carriers of hidden spatial and aesthetic information—aesthetic and conceptual possibilities uncovered through subversion. Jo Kazuhiro and Nobuhiro Masuda, in "Synthesizing the Signal from the Noise: Reflections on Mary Had a Little Lamb," use AI audio synthesis as philosophical rupture—a moment where noise becomes generative rather than obstructive, exposing the limits of the signal-noise paradigm. In "From Staves to Screens," Daniel Louis Lythgoe uses glitches in notation software to destabilize algorithmic interpretation—errors becoming co-creators in a speculative model where rules are made and unmade simultaneously.
The works collected here demonstrate the openness of the speculative approach and its potential to lead listeners into new spaces for thought and experience. We are grateful to all the authors who have shared their speculative flights with us. Now, dear reader, may your own explorations through these pages land you somewhere unexpected: it's time to take off.
Whitehead, Alfred North. "Process and reality." Simon and Schuster, 2010.
Brün, Herbert. "Music and Information and Communication and Chaos and…" Chandra (ed.) When Music Resists Meaning: The Major Writings of Herbert Brün (2004): 44.
Rovelli, Carlo. 2009. „Forget time“. arXiv:0903.3832. Preprint, arXiv, März 27. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv....
Scheib, Christian, n.d. "Weiss / Weisslich 22". Last edited 22.09.2024. https://ablinger.mur.at/docs/w...
The Speculative Sound Synthesis Project is funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) within the Programme for Arts-based Research (PEEK) – PEEK AR 713-G. It is hosted by the Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics (IEM) at the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz.
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