About This Issue

Abstract

In this issue’s first article, Mark Zaki interviews Hubert Howe, who has been an active composer of computer music for over half a century. As a graduate student at Princeton University in the 1960s, Howe co-developed the Music 4B program, an antecedent of Csound. The interview progresses from his early years in the field through to his current directorship of the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival. Howe details some of his compositional techniques, including the use of pitch arrays in his electronic and acoustic pieces, as well as his approach to timbre in computer music.Curtis Roads, a former editor of this journal, is well known for his long career in microsound composition, including his creation of the first computer implementation of granular sound synthesis. In this issue, he and his co-authors describe their recent software for real-time interactive granular synthesis. As is typical in granular synthesis, the program operates on sound files rather than real-time audio input; but the user has real-time control of many synthesis parameters. Unlike much granular synthesis software, the system offers per-grain processing, which means that each grain can have a unique set of values—specifically, for envelope, waveform, amplitude, frequency, spatial position, and filtering. The authors also emphasize their design of the graphical user interface. By mapping synthesis parameters to MIDI controllers, the software can serve as a digital musical instrument (DMI).The article by Giacomo Lepri and Andrew McPherson presents their conclusions from a study in which beginning-to-expert users of the Pure Data graphical programming language created simple DMIs that incorporated basic sensors. Two expert users of the SuperCollider language also used SuperCollider for the task. Among other insights, the authors observed how the programming environment influenced the DMI designs. They suggest that rather than strive for an ideal neutrality in computer music technologies, one might “embrace the weirdness” of a tool’s idiosyncrasies, including the values and aesthetic implications that the tool passes on to it users (in this case, the instrument designers).Front cover. Two musicians play instruments that they designed or helped to design. Top photo: Doga Cavdir works with her Armtop DMI, which includes a tether controller that senses the position of the left arm with three degrees of freedom. Bottom photo: Rodney DuPlessis moves faders on a MIDI device to vary parameters of the granular synthesis software EmissionControl2.Continuing the theme of DMI design, the article by Doga Cavdir and Ge Wang considers ways in which DMIs can augment the usual vocabulary of musicians’ performance gestures by borrowing bodily movements from domains such as dance and sign language. The authors present three case studies of their DMIs, which respectively incorporate dance movements, conducting gestures, and sign language. The third case study, which uses sign language gestures in a metaphorical rather than literal manner, also incorporates loud, low-frequency sounds to offer a corporeal experience of the music to deaf and hard-of-hearing audiences.In this issue’s Reviews section, our frequent contributor Seth Rozanoff discusses an album by French composer Leo Magnien, and DJ Malinowski covers a festival of immersive music having a special focus on Afrofuturism. The Products of Interest section presents an array of recent hardware and software offerings, among them mixers, recorders, converters, synthesizers, and microphones, as well as an inexpensive theremin-like controller that uses a laser sensor instead of antenna capacitance.Starting with this issue, Jeff Morris of Texas A&M University edits the Announcements and News sections. We also welcome to our staff Brian Bemman of Aalborg University and Chuck-jee Chau of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, who have jointly begun to oversee the peer review process. Ross Feller and Margaret Cahill continue to present the Reviews section and the Products of Interest, respectively; and Peter Castine continues to edit the articles (prior to copyediting) and to serve as managing editor. Brett Terry handles the editors’ website, computermusicjournal.org, which complements the publisher’s site for the Journal, direct.mit.edu/comj.Back cover. Top: A flowchart from the article by Roads, Kilgore, and DuPlessis, summarizing the granular synthesis engine of their EmissionControl2 software. Bottom: The software’s graphical user interface.