Isn't the 'audience' already the ultimate partner? If you agree that listening to sound is an intimate, personal, and subjective experience, why not let this be the first consideration in 'creating' music - a music that is less about the sound-image the creator has, and more about the availability of a rich network of possibilities for every 'kind' of listener? More fun for everyone.  

I would say that the audience is the ultimate receiver and that in reception of the sound, there is a good faith partnership between listener and music maker (be it performer or cd player). However, isn't there an implication from the original post that there could be a sort of give-and-take parternship - an interactive model? Maybe a different title for the thread could be "audience as participant"?  

Building on the notion of "audience as participnt", it is possible to apply the concept of paratextuality to composition. The programme note, for example, can be used to explain the overarching musical or interpretive objective that the composer wishes to communicate to the listener. If this is the case, then such information arguably becomes part of a score since it has a definable relationship to the piece that is being performed/diffused. This idea can be extended further to embrace a potential audience’s knowledge base. The composer may use audio recordings within a work (extra-musical materials such as spoken phrases taken from a high profile public speaker) to elicit empathetic, social and/or political reception. Trevor Wishart uses recordings of Princess Diana for the second and fourth movements of his piece Two Women (1998). While these recordings can themselves inform, or reinforce, listeners’ knowledge of Princess Diana’s own subjective state through the fixed paralinguistic qualities of the recorded voice (how the spoken word is delivered and also transformed musically), it can also inform the listener through the notion of epitext. This allows other wider interpretations to form due to their social and political relevance that may have originally been communicated through the media. However, for something to be officially paratextual, the author or his/her associates must accept responsibility for it. Looked at this way, it could be argued that the composer takes on such a responsibility at the time his/her raw materials are chosen. Equally however, s/he may have little control over new paratexts that may come to light after a work has been completed, and may entirely change the work’s context. If we agree that a text can never be totally independent of other texts i. e. intertextual, this allows the composer to capitalise on what might be described as large-scale paratexts that frame the musical text with social commentary. However, listeners’ interpretations and emotional responses are likely to be defined by their point-of-view on the social commentary that is being communicated. For example, sorrow, reverence, hatred or indifference that results, could be a social or political parascore that they bring with them when interpreting a piece of music.  

Take example in a rave sesssion: people dancing create vibrations on the floor. If we could feed back those rhythms to a processing unit and modulate/harmonise them with music it could make the audience participate  

i tried that already: Carolina Caycedo / Guenther Albrecht / Cordula Boesze / Josef Novotny YOU GIVE - WE GIVE improvised electronics & alternative economy june 3rd, 2002 19:30 mica, 1070 Stiftg. 29 Vienna, Austria music created by an exchange between the musicians and the audience, not music divided into production and consumption: "You give - we give" is meant to explore an alternative music apart from mass market & culture. without the active involvement of the audience, no sound is heard - not even by the musicians. the audience is asked to allow the music to happen and share the responsibility.  

I made several attempts to adress the role of the audience. The audience does not only participate passively, the audience always influence a performance actively. There is no way around. But the role of the audience usually is not a controlling one. If the audience would control the work, the artist would loose her role. And that usually is not the interest of an audience. That explains why most "interactive" installations are boring... ;-) Though it could be fun for the interacting member of the audience, the aim of art is to mirror by expression perspectives of the artist. The audience is longing for other perspectives than their own. For that it is essential, that the artists perspective is always present... I did installations and concerts with audience influences, like placing sensors which would replace random generators in my algorithms, or using sounds emmited by the audience, to show the narrow relationship between the work and the audience. But at the same time I would decide what to do with it. In installations I would rather create an illusion of control than let the audience control it... Much more effective... ;-)  

I agree with StefanTiedje. And, what we mean by an audience being a 'partner' in the piece is going to be different, depending on what kind of computer music we are talking about. The audience that 'longs' for a different perspective is an audience whose participation with the work is internal and personal, consistent with expected behaviors in art music concert performances typical for electroacoustic and acousmatic music. The audience may be engage very differently with, say, live DSP performance in an informal, non-concert space; and, with electronica and other dance-related forms, the 'audience' and its reaction to the music is far more participatory, since it hinges on how well the artist is perceived to have done their job.