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contents of the book, I found myself at­ tracted to the chapter on improvisation in live computer music, a topic that particularly interests me. I have always been struck by the "non-liveliness" of computer music, as compared to music that is performed by humans. The de­ bate on how to model human expres­ sion in performance is ongoing. Can it be done? Rowe discusses work by oth­ ers on this fundamental issue, such as the aforementioned George Lewis, Ri­ chard Teitelbaum, Jean Claude Risset, David Jaffe, Andy Schloss, David Wessel and Cort Lippe. However, the chapter is mainly devoted to his own system, Cypher. In Rowe's treatment of commercial interactive systems, MAX is the word; M and Jam Factory are also mentioned. It is true that MAX is a great piece of soft­ ware and today's "lingua franca," but there are more systems to discuss: HMSL, by David Rosenboom (whose work in the field predates Rowe's by quite a few years, but who is not men­ tioned in the book); ForMuLa, by Ron Kuivila; Interactor, by Morton Subotnick and Mark Coniglio . . . George Lewis commented on the MAX proliferation by saying: "As you know, the use of Forth as a language for making interactive pieces predates the existence of MAX by at least 8 years. Well before MIT and IRCAM devised MAX, pieces were shown by Daniel Scheldt, David Behrman, Ron Kuivila, Nick Collins, Rich Gold, Martin Bartlett, Norman White, Michel Waisvisz, John Bischoff, Tim Perkins, Laetitia Sonami, Liz Phillips, Joel Ryan and quite a few oth­ ers. In many ways, I feel that MAX is the institution-based computer music's an­ swer to the need for musicians and com­ posers for an interactive approach, not to performance, but to the composition of the work. . . . Before MAX became important, the same group of people were very excited about [the] Lisp-based environment." It may also be called an advantage that the book isn't crammed with pages full of descriptions of all kinds of softand hardware systems suitable for the creation of interactive music systems. Instead, Rowe focuses more on underly­ ing principles and theoretical consider­ ations, while discussions of practical performance experiences are suffi­ ciently incorporated. As Lewis put it: "Robert's book is excellent, but does not, I feel, pretend to be an exhaustive look at interaction as a field. . . . Robert's article is oriented toward com­ puter composition and recognition of patterns. This is only one part of interactivity. . . . Really, an attempt to be comprehensive would be rather irre­ sponsible in my view. His book is a very well-documented, narrowly directed work that attempts to cover many im­ portant issues. How well he deals with those issues is more important to me than any attempt at a survey of the field. To my knowledge, Robert's book is the first to deal explicitly with inter­ active computer performance, though there are many articles. There is lots of room for more." The book comes with a CD-ROM full of music and software, some of which requires the presence of other software programs such as SmallTalk, LISP, or MAX. Cypher will run on any Macintosh without further specific sup­ port. E-mail addresses of the authors of the software are listed in the Read Me file on the CD-ROM. I have tried out a few of the MAX patches, and some are quite intriguing. The author clearly states in the Read Me file that some parts of the software may not run, so I was warned. Indeed, some patches need specific objects to be installed properly, so users need to be informed about MAX's workings and setup. Some patches did not immediately put me into a "wow" mode. It seemed as if these patches were merely meant to demonstrate MAX in the context of in­ teractive music systems, which is some­ what below the level the book aims to reach, in my estimation. I was also concerned about the avail­ ability of the software supplied on the CD via the Internet—i.e. for free. A quick check of three archives for music software showed me that most of the patches...

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