Premiere: White Concert Hall, University of Missouri-Kansas City: April 4, 2001. Published: On La Limite du bruit (solo CD). Montreal: Empreintes Digitales (IMED 0261), 2002. Further performances: PACE, De Montfort University (2007); Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama (2006); Scarborough Electroacoustics (2003); Finnish National Radio (2003); University of York (2003); International Biennial of Electroacoustic Music, São Paulo (2002); Musica Viva, Portugal (2002); National Review of Live Art, Glasgow (2002); Rien à voir, Montréal (2001). Research summary: Pythagoras's Curtain investigates the perception of tactility through sound using, as source material, audio recordings produced solely by human manual actions. The title points to the adoption/adaptation of the term ‘acousmatic’ by composers of the Groupe de recherches musicales in the 1950s. By way of a reference to an aspect of the teaching methods of Pythagoras, it refers to the perception of sound without direct visual confirmation of the source. The process of working with these sounds in an acousmatic context led to a three-way investigation of the interaction between the physical energy of gesture, the sonic response of the objects being handled, and the application of digital signal processing techniques and ‘interventions’ in the way manual gesture-energy and physical objects interact. In particular digital audio interleaving techniques and techniques of time domain envelope substitution were used to form new energy-object sonic relationships. Techniques of envelope substitution and wave set interleaving are also used to construct new forms of vivid spatial imagery within a stereo format. A discussion of the techniques and musical processes used in the work are reported in ‘Sound-Image Design and Electroacoustic Transformation Processes’ presented at Sonoimágenes 2002, Buenos Aires and further developed in ‘Reflections on sound-image design in electroacoustic music’, Organised Sound, 12(1): 25-33, 2007.