Traditionally, connection management applications (referred to as patchbays) for high-speed audio networking, are predominantly developed using third-generation languages such as C, C# and C++. Due to the rapid increase in distributed audio/video network usage in the world today, connection management applications that control signal routing over these networks have also evolved in complexity to accommodate more functionality. As the result, high-speed audio networking application developers require a tool that will enable them to develop complex connection management applications easily and within the shortest possible time. In addition, this tool should provide them with the reliability and flexibility required to develop applications controlling signal routing in networks carrying real-time data. High-speed audio networks are used for various purposes that include audio/video production and broadcasting. This investigation evaluates the possibility of using Adobe Flash Professional 8, using ActionScript 2.0, for developing connection management applications. Three patchbays, namely the Broadcast patchbay, the Project studio patchbay, and the Hospitality/Convention Centre patchbay were developed and tested for connection management in three sound installation networks, namely the Broadcast network, the Project studio network, and the Hospitality/Convention Centre network. Findings indicate that complex connection management applications can effectively be implemented using the Adobe Flash IDE and ActionScript 2.0.

During the 1950s the experience of recording was transformed by a series of technical innovations including tape recording, editing, the LP record, and stereo sound. Within a decade recording had evolved into an art form in which multiple takes and editing were essential components in the creation of an illusory ideal performance. The British recording industry was at the forefront of development, and the rapid growth in recording activity throughout the 1950s as companies built catalogues of LP records, at first in mono but later in stereo, had a profound impact on the music profession in Britain. Despite this, there are few documented accounts of working practices, or of the experiences of those involved in recording at this time, and the subject has received sparse coverage in academic publications. This thesis studies the development of the recording of classical music in Britain in the long 1950s, the core period under discussion being 1948 to 1964. It begins by considering the current literature on recording, the cultural history of the period in relation to classical music, and the development of recording in the 1950s. Oral history informs the central part of the thesis, based on the analysis of 89 interviews with musicians, producers, engineers and others involved in recording during the 1950s and 1960s. The thesis concludes with five case studies, four of significant recordings - Tristan und Isolde (1952), Peter Grimes (1958), Elektra (1966-67), and Scheherazade (1964) - and one of a television programme, The Anatomy of a Record (1975), examining aspects of the recording process. The thesis reveals the ways in which musicians, producers, and engineers responded to the challenges and opportunities created by advances in technology, changing attitudes towards the aesthetics of performance on record, and the evolving nature of practices and relationships in the studio. It also highlights the wider impact of recording on musical practice and its central role in helping to raise standards of musical performance, develop audiences for classical music, and expand the repertoire in concert and on record.

In the summer of 1953, Karlheinz Stockhausen began composing his first piece of elektronische Musik at the Westdeutscher Rundfunk Studio for Electronic Music in Cologne. Up to that point, Stockhausen's only experience with electroacoustic music was his time spent at the Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française the previous year, where he assisted Pierre Schaeffer and composed a piece of musique concrète. An early case study in the marriage of serial aesthetics and electroacoustic techniques, Studie I is a rigorously organized work that reflects Stockhausen's compositional philosophy of a unified structural principle in which all musical materials and parametric values are generated by and arranged according to a single governing series. In spite of this meticulously wrought serial structure, Studie I displays features that are the consequences of the realities of electronic sound production either imposing on the sonic result, or altering the compositional plan entirely. I use a three-part approach to my analysis of Studie I by examining Stockhausen's serial system, the electroacoustic studio techniques in use in 1953, and the original recorded realization through spectrographic analysis. Using this methodology, I expose the blurring of the supposed divide between elektronische Musik and musique concrète by exploring the features that lie between the serial plan and the technical processes Stockhausen used to realize Studie I.