Musically, it challenges western fixations with so-called perfect pitch and tonality. Coralie Joyce's article also engages with determining cultural elements by discussing her work with computer technologies and how these are integral to her musical manipulation of language structures. In her description of the manner in which she uses electronic musical tools to manipulate language samples from Gaelic and Estonian cultures, she argues for the use of technologies and techniques to revise and revitalise cultural antecedents and offer contexts and contents for the present and future. Linked to Joyce's concern for the cultural contexts, histories and significances attached to music and sound, Karl Neuenfeldt discusses how music is collected, curated and used for the Microsoft reference CD-ROMs Encarta 97 World Atlas and Encarta 97 Encyclopedia. He explores the way in which cultural considerations, ethnocentrism and educational aims intersect with industry and practical concerns to affect the selection and use of music samples in the entries for these packages.
Further studies discuss sound and music as an element in forms of converging media.
He uses these as illustrations of a variety of ways in which sound is used, ranging from decorative or navigational aids, to metaphorically 'poetic' devices. Sound, he argues, need not merely accompany, support or reinforce visual imagery and texts but can also constitute an affective feature in its own right. Ian Whalley discusses the uses of the web site established by the Music Department at the University of Waikato in New Zealand and compares its uses to the original stated aims of those establishing the site. His observations of the discrepancies between intentions and actual uses of the web site can be seen as useful material in research for and development of future sites, and also demonstrates how many discussions and analyses of web sites and the Internet are still clothed in euphoria rather than evidence of practical outcomes. It may well be too presumptuous to argue that the overbearing dominance of the visual and visual perception in western culture is waning.