An alternative to the above approaches is to avoid the pitch/duration paradigm and instrumental performance as a gesture and sound referent, and concentrate on timbral and spatial transformation as the basis for compositional practice. This production-based aesthetic is often embedded in environmental sound and microtime as a new language (Vaggione 1996, Smalley 1997). The approach technically overcomes MIDI’s problematic dislocation of sound and control mechanism.

The acousmatic idiom often negates ideas of external musical theoretical referents about form in favour of a textural organisation of musical time (Menezes 1997). Proponents argue that the dislocation of sound source from context and location allows for the detail of a sound object to be reinvented within a piece. This shift from an external absolute through tonality or other formalist system to an internal one is significant in that the stage on which the music is understood and played out is the imagination, rather than an intellectual construct (Rudy 1999). It provides the basis for an often slowly evolving lexicon of gestures as discourse. In conjunction, the dynamic manipulation of space using real-time effects also provides the basis for extended structural discourse.

A limitation here is that despite the intent, it is difficult to separate the associations people have with known sound gestures or objects as metaphors used within a piece, regardless of self-referencing. (Gorbman 1974, Waters 1994, Windsor 1997). A further limitation as communicative discourse compared to the popular music aesthetic is again the absence of the body through the marginalisation of real-time melodic performance and rhythm as primary organising dialectics. Musical elements traditionally considered background are often used as foreground in this new style which adds to the negation of the grammar of performance gestures on which instrumental language is based, however surrogate. Communication through the continuity of common understandings of musicality then diminishes. As crude as may it appear, non-initiates’ response to this idiom often illustrate a preference for singability, a narrative element, and implicit rather than literal sound metaphors (Bridger 1993).

How is the amalgamation of the known and the unknown to be achieved? The integration of popular music’s use of redundancy with modernist innovation as aesthetic had already begun with the new conservatism in music before the widespread application of digital technology. Minimalism through the work of Glass, Budd, Young and Reich invented new language in contrast to the imitative language of pop, yet made it accessible through rhythmic repetition, ostinato and performance gesture (Cope 1993). Combined with new tonality, Riley, Glass and Harrison also returned to simpler structural forms, static harmonic movement and drones.

The bridge between the minimalist aesthetic and popular music in analogue media began with early experiments in ambient and new age music (Eno CD1980). Both these idioms now have a developed repertoire and sub genres based on techniques such as drones, environmental sounds, and editing as composition. An innovation here was that works were often not intended for focused listening, therefore expanding musical communication beyond emotional, intellectual and physical discourse through functioning similar to much narrative film music (Gorbman 1974). Many works in this idiom return to tonality as a basis for musical organisation.

Further common ground between minimalism and analogue popular music ex-