When this issue was first proposed, the intention was straightforward: electroacoustic audiovisual composition has long explored the relationship between sound, image and technology, yet the perceptual and conceptual phenomena emerging from their integration remain only partially understood when the two media are treated as equals. The call sought to examine how intermediality, the dynamic combination and integration of distinct media into an indissoluble bond of reciprocal meaning-making, reshapes not only the creation of audiovisual works but also their perception and theorisation, positioning audiovisual composition as a fusion process rather than the juxtaposition of distinct media. Embedded in this was a further claim: that musique concrète thinking, extended into the visual domain, offers a way of understanding how artists manage the tension between mimesis and abstraction and between narrative and non-narrative structure within what this issue terms the intermedial space, a domain where sound and image coexist as equals, interact and mutually shape meaning rather than one illustrating the other. This is not the first time Organised Sound has returned to the imagistic residue that musique concrète thinking leaves on listening and looking alike. Simon Atkinson’s Reference Atkinson2010 special issue on ‘Sonic Imagery’ traced how acousmatic listening, despite the tradition’s historical wariness of ‘visualism’, has always carried its own latent image-making, a lineage this issue extends by asking what happens when that latent image becomes an actual, co-equal visual medium. In that issue, John Coulter (Reference Coulter2010) offered a conceptual framework for media pairing that sought to resolve a related paradox, specifically whether pairing acousmatic sound with an actual moving image risks duplicating or conflicting with the imagery listeners already generate unaided. His response, that audiovisual and acousmatic experience may differ less than assumed, remains an early, perception-based example of the very question of constructive versus destructive media features, an interaction this issue reframes as intermedial interference.
My recent work on intermedial interference extends this perceptual question into a critical one, asking not only when media features interact constructively or destructively, but also how such interactions raise questions of interpretation and the ethics of remediated source material in works that resist hierarchical relationships between sound and image. Whereas that resistance to hierarchy is a compositional stance, an assumption of equity that composers bring to their material, the intermedial space itself remains neutral: a perceptual domain in which media features interact and may produce interference, without prescribing equality as an outcome. It is this assumption of equity, not a property of the space itself, that the contributors to this issue both take for granted and test.
Reading Louise Harris’s contribution to this issue, however, provoked a doubt I have not been able to fully resolve, and one I suspect this issue does not resolve either, nor should it. Harris, writing from the position of a composer whose practice has helped define the field of audiovisual composition, questions whether the intermedial framework this issue proposes is still necessary. Her article asks what ‘intermedia’ actually means for audiovisual composition, both as a compositional practice and as a perceptual experience, and whether the field still depends on that framing to establish its legitimacy, while allowing that intermedial thinking retains value when it serves a specific argument or analysis. Harris’s own transperception/transconception distinction implicitly makes the same diagnosis this issue does, namely that compositional practice has been under-theorised in favour of reception. However, she addresses this by stepping outside the intermedial framework, whereas this issue insists on intermediality’s relevance to both sides of that divide. Reflecting on her own compositional process, she introduces transconception as a partner term to her earlier concept of transperception, offering a vocabulary for the intuitive, embodied dimensions of composing audiovisually that does not depend on borrowed frameworks. Her conclusion is pointed: audiovisual composition may now be sufficiently well understood, as both a field and a category of artwork, to stand as its own art form, with its own terminologies and conceptual architecture, requiring no external framework to justify its existence. Tellingly, her audiovisual space and my concept of intermedial space developed independently. This suggests that the gap I describe is less a matter of missing concepts than of a fragmented critical language for articulating what practitioners already sense in practice.
What is worth highlighting is that intermedia is neither a genre nor a technologically mediated method of distributing a work of art, as in multimedia. Dick Higgins coined the term to distinguish forms of artistic expression already known in the early sixties from something new developing at that time (Higgins and Higgins Reference Higgins and Higgins2001). It helped differentiate ‘intermedia’ works from other expressive forms without being ‘prescriptive’ or categorising (ibid.), ‘works that conceptually fall between already known media’ (ibid.: 52), producing a synergistic perceptual experience. However, Higgins himself states in his 1981 addendum, included in Higgins and Higgins (Reference Higgins and Higgins2001), that the term intermedia ‘allows for an ingress to a work which otherwise seems opaque and impenetrable, but once that ingress has been made, it is no longer useful to harp upon the intermediality of a work’ (ibid.: 53). He further strengthens this insight, stating that ‘what was helpful as a beginning would, if maintained, become an obsession which braked the flow into the work and its needs and potentials’ (ibid.: 53).
Convergence and caution together would seem to settle the matter in Harris’s favour. Yet, I am not persuaded the matter is settled. I agree with Harris that audiovisual composition no longer requires intermediality or any other borrowed framework to legitimise its status as an independent art form; I think the field’s accumulated practice has settled that argument. What I am less certain of is whether the community of composers, practitioners, theoreticians and analysts around that field has yet caught up with what its conceptual foundations make possible. The question this issue ultimately poses, then, is not whether audiovisual composition needs intermediality to exist, but whether its practitioners are yet fully aware of the creative and critical potential that intermedial thinking (real fusion, rather than the coexistence of separate media) offers them in practice.
This also extends to a question this issue does not resolve: whether the agency historically assigned to the composer still holds once creation is distributed across other participants, human and otherwise. Harris herself has noted that her earlier work failed to elicit the critical pushback she hoped for. If this issue achieves nothing else, I hope it offers the discourse she and this field have been waiting for. I believe the main objective of this thematic issue is to raise awareness and elicit insightful discourse within our community about the core foundations of our practice.
The response to the call was substantial and, I would say, successful, in that contributors did not merely apply its framework but also extended and, in places, contested it. Taken together, these contributions cohere around four recurring threads, which I use here to structure the introductions that follow: the conceptual foundations of intermediality; the systems and technologies that couple media and enable interaction; the perceptual and embodied experience of audiovisual fusion; and the questions of agency, ethics and memory that arise when authorship is distributed across human, non-human and algorithmic sources.
The issue opens with a group of articles returning, each in its own way, to the conceptual foundations of intermediality. Isaac Baggaley transposes debates on indexicality and the photographic trace, from Bazin, Barthes and Gunning, into the sonic domain, proposing that recorded sound’s connection to its source is better grounded in physical causality than in resemblance or metaphor. Boyi Bai revisits schizophonia, long used to describe sound’s separation from its source and the disembodied, unsettling experience said to follow, and offers ‘mediated auditory dislocation’ as a non-normative alternative, developed through a VR soundscape work that encourages listeners to reconfigure that separation for themselves. My contribution turns to intermedial interference within the intermedial space, tracing how typologies of synchrony, associative mapping and balance operate within a single case study, in which questions of remediation, meta-narrative and audience interpretation are examined in detail. Antonio Sousa Dias, working across a book, a staged performance and an installation developed with the poet Maria Teresa Horta, proposes that intermediality is better understood as a composition of thresholds than as a continuous simultaneity between media. Louise Harris, whose contribution is discussed at length above, closes this group by asking whether audiovisual composition has now outgrown the intermedial framework altogether, offering transconception as a partner to her earlier transperception, a vocabulary native to the practice itself.
A second group turns to the systems and technologies that couple, map and enable real-time interaction between sound and image. Kristian North and Mike Cassidy open with audio-laser synthesis, in which a single signal drives both sound and light. Drawing on Daniel Stern’s vitality affects, they develop a compositional language that treats neither medium as prior to the other. Thomas Didiot-Cook then poses a pointed question about such shared-substrate systems: does causal coupling actually deliver perceptual parity? His study of the Cellular Au-Tonnetz, tested across audio-only, visual-only and audiovisual conditions, finds that apparent mismatch is often resolved productively only when both media are restored. Roberto Alonso Trillo, Peter Nelson and Kratika Jain extend the question of coupling to telematic, multi-performer contexts, examining multimodal mapping as a collaborative methodology in which risk and interdependency become dramaturgical forces in their own right. Nicole Carroll and John Ferguson ground coupling in the tangible object, placing DIY instruments at the centre of live electroacoustic performance and considering the performer’s presence through Chion’s audiovisual frameworks. Patrick Hartono closes the group with a productive counterpoint, treating text as a compositional agent that deliberately forgoes synchronisation and audio-reactive coupling altogether and showing how meaning can anchor itself in their absence.
Elsewhere, several contributions treat perception itself as compositional material. Myriam Boucher draws on phenomenology and autoethnography to examine multisensory listening and embodiment in videomusic, proposing texture, synchresis and habitation as means of organising sensory experience within a lived, rather than merely represented, environment. Tommaso Perego develops the concept of Sonic Movement, comparing movement perceived through sound with movement generated by the body in dance, and considers how spatial audio composition might be structured around the gestures implied by such movement. Blake Johnston proposes Perceptual Translation, a set of strategies that extend intermedial thinking beyond formal media relations to the reorganisation of sound, body, space and technology. These strategies are developed through wearable works that place listeners in sustained perceptual contradiction.
A final group turns to questions of agency, ethics and memory that arise when authorship is no longer assumed to rest with the composer alone. Bowen Wu examines a multispecies-algorithmic installation in which fish behaviour, algorithmic processes and audiovisual generation interact asynchronously, proposing ‘conflict mechanisms’ to describe an agency that circulates rather than settles. Rama Gottfried draws on Whitehead’s process philosophy and Foucault’s epistemology of resemblance to propose a ‘living’ animist model of intermedial ecology, distributed equally among human and non-human participants. Mirko Ettore D’Agostino and Armando Rotondi examine an intermedial theatre project in which sound, text and scenic space operate on equal footing, arguing that its dramaturgy transforms spectators into co-authors of the performative event. Chen Liu closes this group with a study of Japanese temple bells melted down during the Second World War, proposing ‘sonic ruins’ as a way of understanding how intermediality can hold historical trauma, ritual continuity and absence as perceptible form, rather than resolving them into synchronised narrative.
Beyond the thematic section, this issue also features contributions that extend the journal’s concerns with sound, technology and listening in other directions. Will Schrimshaw reframes the modular synthesiser through its audiovisual presentation alongside houseplants, tracing a domestic imaginary and an ideal of portability from early instrument design to contemporary ‘ambient machines’ and the association of synthesis with nurture and care. Nick Collins turns from the domestic to the speculative, presenting a generative system for imagining alien music by altering human memory constraints, with an alien language generated in parallel. Jonathan Packham analyses Sonamb’s Neural Materials, a live audiovisual work built around a machine-learning model trained on a post-industrial sonic dataset, asking whether such systems can evoke space and heritage by reactivating the indexical traces of their source sounds. Lisa Conway and Eldad Tsabary attend to materials of a different kind, arguing from their 40-loudspeaker installation Waste Whisperer that salvaged e-waste loudspeakers open creative opportunities for spatialisation and unsettle conventions of matching and transparency in audio. Finally, Antoine Bellemare-Pepin, François Lespinasse and Eldad Tsabary propose a neurophenomenological framework that treats the harmonic structure of brain–body oscillations as a compositional medium, deriving adaptive microtonal tunings and prototyping creative brain–computer interfaces for closed-loop feedback.
