Acousmatic reasoning: an organised listening with imagination

This paper proposes acousmatic reasoning as a way of organised listening to electroacoustic music. It also examines the inference processes of acousmatic reasoning—overcoded, undercoded, and creative abudctions—as well as syntactically relevant properties (SRPs), properties of sound-images identified by listeners and closely related to the processes of acousmatic reasoning. The paper then sets out an analaytical listening exercise using The Flywheel Dream (1994) by Paul Koonce to show how acousmatic reasoning works in electroacoustic music listening.