After nearly a century of musicological research, sound-based composition pedagogy stillstruggles to establish analytical and archival practices. The composer has access to a diverse array of typomorphological and technological dimensions, which creates an informatic space far larger than what is used in traditional note-based composition. Many published works seek to define aspects of the space, but they are spread across many disparate contexts and their terminologies and philosophies are not always aligned. Furthermore, the discipline’s lack of prescriptive codes means that each work is its own idiosyncratic construction, which demands an idiosyncratic analysis in turn. Pedagogues are left with few resources to accomplish this, and no grounds with which to establish new curricula. As a result, students often progress with a greater understanding of their technological tools than the aesthetics of their field.

This document offers a resource and methodology as a solution. Pertinent aural features areabstracted from several musicological works on electroacoustic music and a taxonomic space is designed to organize them. The author’s analytical methodology will then be demonstrated, showing how aural features from the space can be used in a parametric context befitting an idiosyncratic analysis. The data gathered from this analysis will be used as evidence in a case study of one of the author’s own works – What Sleeps Beneath.