Joanna Bailie is a London-born Brussels-based composer and sound artist. She is the founder and artistic director of Ensemble Plus-Minus and is currently working on her doctorate in the perception of reality in music at City University, London. Here, she discusses the human capacity for remembering music, and the need for better programming in contemporary music.

Which other art form do you think shares most in common with music?

I prefer to think about all art forms as being fundamentally linked to each other. It's also important to say that for me music is a rather nebulous subset of sound, and its borders depend more on an individual's perspective than they do on any concrete properties. In many ways I'd rather call myself an artist than a composer because 'composer' seems to represent something a bit dusty, tied to the classical tradition and somehow not as occupied with making stuff that reflects the concerns of art in the here and now. Music separates itself off from the other arts and perceives itself as quite a specialised activity, often to its own detriment.