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Jonty Harrison
One of the main criteria in Pierre Schaeffer´s definition of the "sound objects" was that, through the process of "reduced listening", one should hear sound material purely as sound, divorced from any associations with its physical origins in other words, what is significant about a recorded violin sound (for example) is that particular sound, its unique identity, and not its "violin-ness". Despite this ideal, a rich repertoire of music has been created since the 1950s which plays precisely on the ambiguities evoked when recognition and contextualisation of sound matieral rub shoulders with more abstracted (and abstract) musical structures. But as these structures themselves grow organically out of the peculiarities of the individual sound objects within them, the ambiguity is compounded: interconnections and multiple levels of meaning proliferate. The known becomes strange and the unknown familiar in a continuum of reality, unreality and surreality, where boundaries shift and continually renewed definitions are the only constant ...
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Prix Ars Electronica - International Competition for Cyberarts 
