Reviewed by: The Sound of Innovation: Stanford and the Computer Music Revolution by Andrew J. Nelson Simon Zagorski-Thomas (bio) The Sound of Innovation: Stanford and the Computer Music Revolution. By Andrew J. Nelson. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015. Pp. 248. $34. The Sound of Innovation provides a fascinating journey through the history of Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). Andrew Nelson has indeed drawn on “extensive archival research and dozens of interviews with digital music pioneers” (inside front cover notes) to bring this story together. One of the first keyboards I bought when I started a commercial studio in the mid-1980s was a Yamaha DX7, the hugely influential and profitable result of the partnership between Yamaha and John Chowning’s CCRMA. My first degree was a joint honors that included Artificial Intelligence and, after I’d moved away from programming toward being a “consumer” of commercial music computing, the DX7, with Chowning’s FM synthesis, was one of the few things that drew me into the more theoretical world of shaping sounds using digital processors. So, not only did I want to read this book, I also found myself drawn into the narrative and wanting it to be an epic saga of heroism. The first five chapters certainly drew me in and allowed, even encouraged, me to construct that sort of story. The remainder of the book brought me back to earth and reminded me that life is more complicated. That may not make it a very good epic saga but it does make a better history book. The CCRMA certainly deserves the sobriquet “hotbed,” and Nelson [End Page 1039] has done a great job of gathering together the evidence about what happened. I’m less convinced about the explanatory theory and, therefore, how well it fits with the MIT Inside Technology series aim to “stimulate a variety of perspectives that address the social shaping of technology.” It is not that the explanatory power of multivocality to show “how interdisciplinarity, open innovation and commercialization not only can reinforce one another, but also can form an inseparable web of mutual fate” (p. 9) is problematic. It is just that I felt there was a suggestion of agency around the CCRMA throughout the book that made that explanation more two-dimensional. So what do I mean by “a suggestion of agency”? Nelson describes multivocality as a “tactical capacity” (p. 161), a tool used by a successful agent, rather than as a generalized attribute of a system. There may be many instances of the CCRMA deliberately sustaining “multiple attributions to its activities” (p. 161) in ways that worked to its advantage. However, I wasn’t convinced that, for example, the involvement of the National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, and the California Arts Council should be uncritically attributed to the “CCRMA’s skill at multivocality” (p. 162) rather than to more general attributes of the system (probably including that skill). I also felt the definition of success and progression could have been explored in more nuanced terms. The tangled web of commercial protectionism and open access can be read as an optimal combination of financial security and academic freedom in retrospect, but this doesn’t amount to the “secret formula” that Dane Stangler’s back cover quote suggests. I wonder if it amounts to much more than saying that if you want to be generous it’s a good idea to get rich first. Perhaps it’s my dour British sensibility but the narrative of superlatives grated on me. On the one hand, that may be an unpleasant by-product of me growing up without central heating in a drizzle-based climate, but it also comes from a wariness of history written by the winners. If the United Kingdom can have written its own history to the extent that the rest of the world doesn’t unanimously think of “the Empire” as a period of ruthless thievery and bloody genocide, then what are all the other victorious authors of their own history getting away with? What I should emphasize though, before I’m accused of setting up a straw man, is that I...