The Electroacoustic Performance Between Improvisation and Execution: Present State and Future Perspectives 

Today, the practice of live electronics is one of the most fertile areas for contemporary music production, yet also one of the most difficult to encompass into a definition. In this introductory paper, we hope to investigate what the current state of electroacoustic performing arts is, and what prospects could lie ahead.

Live electronics performance is a field that defies traditional categories and oscillates between improvisation and performance, between sound craftsmanship and technological design, and between physical presence and digital mediation. The defining characteristic of electroacoustic improvisation is in its ability to generate meaning through instability, to make sound a space where intention and chance meet. It is a musical practice that not only requires attention, listening and responsibility, but mostly the awareness that sound is not a predictable product.

This is true for all the legacies gathered by contemporary live electronics in the form of electroacoustic improvisation; the experiences of intuitive music by K. Stockhausen (Aus den sieben Tagen, 1968; Für kommende Zeiten, 1968–1970), J. Cage’s indeterminate music Variations VI, 1966), Cornelius Cardew (Treatise, 1963–1967), free jazz improvisation, and Butch Morris’s Conduction®… to name but a few of the “preliminary practices”. 

Today, these traditions are carried forward by groups and research centres, including some in Italy. Among these are the OEOAS | Orchestra Elettroacustica Officina Arti Soniche (Elio Martusciello, Naples) and TempoReale (Luciano Berio, Florence).

In light of the above, in the introduction to the volume Live Electronic Music: Composition, Performance, Study (Bertonali, Burle, Sallis, Zattra eds, 2018), two fundamental aspects emerge regarding attempted definitions of live electronic music. On the one hand, an updated one takes previous endeavours into account:

Currently, (…) live electronic music usually refers to works involving the digital management or manipulation of sound, placing it firmly in the era of personal computing that emerged in the last decades of the twentieth century. Ironically, this leads to the rather odd relegation of earlier examples based on analogue technologies to the prehistory of the live electronic music, even though these earlier examples generated the term in the first place. These diverse perspectives result in strikingly different ways of explaining what live electronic music is and how it developed. For example, Peter Manning uses the term live electronic music to discuss the period from the 1950s to the digital revolution of the 1980s. By contrast, Angela Ida De Benedictis (…) focuses resolutely on the period from the 1980s to the present. (…) She divides her period of study into two phases: the first is designated the «historical phase of live electronic music» (the 1980s and early 1990s), followed by the current phase «characterised by the hybridisation of live electronics with computer music».

On the other hand, there is an argument that what can truly be analysed in live electronics is neither the score nor the technical apparatus, but rather, the performance. The work only exists in its transience, as it is a situated sonic event. It rejects the fixity of the object to assert itself as a process of continuous interaction between gesture, technology and listening. 

From this perspective, improvisation takes on a central role. It is not merely a mode of expression, but a structural condition of live electroacoustic practice. Even in seemingly “controlled” contexts, the presence of technology introduces elements of unpredictability that compel the performer to adapt constantly. The central role of improvisation and adaptability is why the recent trend towards stability, and fixed repertoire is both a sign of positive maturity and a danger for live electronics performances. Crystallizing in codified forms poses the risk of losing at least some of its original tension and the capacity to reinvent itself with every gesture, standardizing the musical offer for the mass audience. We might then think of a possible definition of electroacoustic performance as an act of constant negotiation with the unexpected, a real-time practice in which listening and responsiveness become compositional material.

This highly embodied relational dimension finds a point of contact with Vincenzo Caporaletti’s theory of audiotactile music. In these genres (including but not limited to, jazz and funk), sound production arises from the direct link between gesture and acoustic result, within a sensory circuit that unites body, ear, and space. 

In live electronics, this relationship is mediated by the technology, but this does not make it less tangible. The performer develops a different kind of sensitivity, which we might call “techno-tactile”: the gesture does not directly produce the sound, but activates its potential through a system that responds, sometimes unpredictably. Electroacoustic improvisation is founded on this tension between control and loss. It is in this liminal space of instability that the performative truth of the improvisational gesture manifests itself. 

Putting the gesture and the conscious act of listening at the centre of everything is what distinguishes electroacoustic improvisation from analogous practices such as live coding: the performer programmes sounds live on stage, but what takes place is a conceptual representation of the musical act, rather than its sensory embodiment. Audiotactility, which for Caporaletti is a physiological condition of musical making, is suspended here--gesture is reduced to typing, and the relationship between body and sound is mediated by an abstract and symbolic language, replacing bodily feedback with the logic of a formal system. In this sense, live coding can be considered a “post-performative” practice, in which the time of listening and that of writing only virtually coincide. Its spectacular nature lies in conceptual transparency, not in the physicality of the gesture.

One aspect that is often underestimated, yet crucial to understanding the nature of electroacoustic performance, is the direct connection between mind and body. In a context where sound production is increasingly mediated by technology (see, in this regard, the three-phase arc of the evolution of instrumentation described in F. Sallis, V. Bertonali, J. Burle, L. Zattra, 2018), the performer’s body does not disappear, but is redefined as a site of interface and cognitive mediation. Embodiment, in the phenomenological sense of the term, concerns not only physical gesture, but the entire perceptual-motor system that allows one to “think through the body”. Even when the performer acts upon a seemingly neutral surface such as a laptop or a controller, musical construction remains rooted in a situated corporeality, which filters every sonic decision through a tactile and kinesthetic memory. One might almost speak, then, of “techno-aesthetics”, in the dual sense of aesthetics embodied in the relationship between technique, craftsmanship, the related knowledge produced through making, and of the sensations accompanying contact with matter transformed through labour. It is within techno-aesthetics that human creativity and the randomness generated by machines come together to bring forth an improvised musical performance and composition. 

In this sense, electroacoustic performance cannot be understood merely as a stream of data or an algorithmic architecture; it is an embodied event, in which the body becomes a vehicle for listening and response. The gesture, even when invisible or minimal, retains a semantic value: it is the point of contact between intention and sound, between physical space and acoustic space. Every micro-variation (be it a movement, a pressure, or a reaction time) radically alters the sound configuration and consequently, the overall perception of the event.

From this perspective, the most authentic performance of live electronics is not that which seeks to erase the body behind the machine, but that which reactivates it as a sensory organ, as a filter and prosthesis of sonic thought. The performative act becomes an extension of the nervous system: the performer does not simply control the sound, but feels it, passes through it, and co-constructs it in a continuous perceptual feedback loop. It is this form of embodiment that keeps the audio-tactile dimension alive even within the digital realm: sound is not an external object, but a phenomenon that is generated and perceived within the performer’s own body.

It is clear, then, that the true power of live electronics emerges when the performance is rooted in the physical experience of sound. Electroacoustic improvisation, which may involve controllers, sensors, microphones or interactive patches, maintains a direct relationship with the materiality of the acoustic event. The performer listens, reacts, and shapes the sound at the very moment they produce it. As clearly explained in Musica imprevedibile. Storia, metodi e training per l’improvvisazione collettiva (F. Giomi, 2022), the performer does not act upon an abstract model, but upon a real environment, in which every variation in pressure, spatiality or sound density elicits a different response. In this sense, the gesture is not merely a technical mean, but a formative principle; it is what transforms the electronic system into a musical instrument.

In this context, the audience no longer merely watches a performance, but takes part in a shared experience of which they become co-creators. Live electroacoustic music cannot, in fact, exist without a community of listeners who embrace its precariousness and share its tension in the here and now. It is an immersive listening experience that becomes part of the very act of sound generation, regardless of the listener-participant’s level of electroacoustic literacy. Herein lies one of the distinctive features of live electronics performances: the extraordinary ability of certain aspects to be perceived by anyone, whatever the level of “training” of their ear in this field.

From this also stems the need to overcome the technological fetishism that still afflicts part of the electronic scene today (namely, the fascination with vintage hardware, modular synthesizers or exclusive software), risking the reduction of the practice to a cold exercise in material aesthetics, forgetting that the value of live electronics does not lie in the instrument, but in the way it is brought to life by gesture and listening. Angela Ida De Benedictis’ essay addresses this precisely: how much of the “live” element remains truly alive in an age when technology tends to make everything replicable and perfectly controlled? According to the author, the growing automation of electronic practices has rendered the dimension of immediacy meaningless, transforming performance into simulation. However, we argue that perhaps this is not a death, but a change of state. The vitality of contemporary live electronics lies not in the illusion of spontaneity, but in the ability to remain open to the unexpected even within the digital system. Its most authentic form is not one that eliminates error, but one that embraces it as part of its own generative logic.

New forms of digital instrument-making, ranging from hybrid sensory systems to DIY controllers, represent in this sense a return to a craft-based conception of the instrument: not a standardised object, but a device built around a body and a way of listening. Each electronic instrument thus becomes an extension of the performer’s identity, the result of a design that is all around technical, aesthetic and perceptual. This process of hybridisation restores electronic music to a tactile and corporeal component that live coding, in its symbolic and abstract dimension, tends to lack.  

Ultimately, live electronics are not dead, but thrives on its own inherent imbalance. It is a practice that survives precisely because of its vulnerability, its openness to risk, and its ability to have time and listening as its very building blocks. In this sense, electroacoustic improvisation represents not only the most authentic form of live electronics, but also the most radically human one, in which technology does not replace the body, but extends it, brings it into play, and compels it to resonate with what it does not yet know.

Its future, perhaps, does not lie in establishing itself as a genre, but in continuing to occupy a liminal, fluid position, where improvisation and performance merge and where sound remains perpetually poised between control and freedom.

Footnotes

1 Angela Ida De Benedictis recalls this well, noting how performers challenge the category itself through the invention and use of new technologies and means of synthesis, thereby imbuing them with new meaning. It should also be emphasised that, in reality, the very definition of live electronics has, over time, become a sort of catch-all term that now refers almost exclusively to the set of instruments or the performance practice (A. I. De Benedictis, ‘Live is Dead? Some Remarks about Live Electronic Practice and Listening’, in G. Borio (ed.), Musical Listening in the Age of Technological Reproduction, 2015).

2  In which “OEOAS Conduction” is practised, a method with two fundamental aims: to stimulate collective improvisational musical creativity and to foster, in the figure of the conductor, the art of “maieutics”. The first of these aims is achieved through improvisational practice and the formation of an orchestra that includes every type of instrument (classical, ethnic, electronic, homemade) and whatever musical ability each individual musician possesses (expert, student, novice). This is made possible by the close relationship with the second objective, which invites the conductor not so much to direct or lead the musicians towards their own musical idea (that of the conductor), but to highlight, to unearth (as an archaeologist does) the forms and content that the musicians themselves create, invent, discover and propose from time to time. It is therefore a complex ecosystem that places at its centre the human being and their capacity for relationship (https://sites.google.com/site/orchestraoeoas/home?pli=1).

3 Founded by Luciano Berio in Florence in 1987, it is now a leading centre for research, production and training in the field of new musical technologies and electronic music. Since its inception, the Centre has been dedicated to the performance of Berio’s works, which have led it to perform in the most prestigious concert venues around the world. The development of standards of quality and creativity derived from these experiences has been reflected in the work carried out on an ongoing basis with both established composers and artists and emerging young musicians. The main themes of the research reflect a concept of versatility that has always characterised Tempo Reale’s choices and initiatives: the creation of musical events of great depth, the study of live sound processing, experiences of interaction between sound and space, and the synergy between creativity, scientific expertise, and rigour in performance and teaching (https://temporeale.it).

4 F. Sallis, V. Bertonali, J. Burle, L. Zattra eds., Live Electronic Music: Composition, Performance, Study, 2018.

5 This is also linked to the difficulty highlighted by De Benedictis in his ex ante analysis of the score, which is best addressed after the performance (A. I. De Benedictis, Live is Dead?). 

6 E. Besseghini, VOGLIA DI EVASIONE | La rivincita della musica elettronica e la critica all’uomo-macchina, 12th August 2023, https://linkiesta.it/2023/08/musica-elettronica-festival-post-pandemia-techno/.

7 V. Caporaletti, Teoria delle musiche audiotattili. Una introduzione, 2022.

8 This also raises the question of authorship in contemporary performance (see A. I. De Benedictis, ‘Authorship and performance tradition in the age of technology with examples from the performance history of works by Luigi Nono, Luciano Berio, and Karlheinz Stockhausen’, in F. Sallis, V. Bertonali, J. Burle, L. Zattra, eds., op. cit.), because the coexistence of the human element and electronic equipment leads to a shift in perspective from composition (in which one wonders how much of it is human inventiveness and how much is the ‘merit’ of the machine) to listening (the audience has a different perception of authorship). It remains true, however, that every stage in the author-work-performance chain renders the result authorial and ‘human’ because it derives from choices and influences that are the responsibility of, and affect, the composer and the performer.

 Incidentally, please refer to the doctoral thesis by L. Perciballi (personal communication), guitarist, sound designer and improviser whose collaborations include IRCAM in Paris. 

9 ‘Techno-aesthetic’, G. Simondon, cited in J. Randell and H. C. Rietveld, ‘EURORACK TO VCV RACK. Modular Synthesis as Compositional Performance’, in E. J. Teboul, A. Kitzmann and E. Engström, *Modular Synthesis*, 2024.

10 F. Giomi, Musica imprevedibile. Storia, metodi e training per l’improvvisazione collettiva, 2022. Francesco Giomi is, by way of example and not an exhaustive list, a lecturer in Performance and Interpretation of Electroacoustic Music within the Electroacoustic Improvisation course at the “G. B. Martini” Conservatoire in Bologna and director of the TempoReale Centre for Research, Production and Music Education. 

11 A. I. De Benedictis, op. cit.

Article edited and formatted by Ryan Jung on 06.06.2026