About This Issue

The musician’s interface—this issue’s theme—has intrigued practitioners of computer music since the early years of the discipline. Even “the father of computer music,” Max Mathews, hardly rested on his laurels as the 1950s pioneer of the so-called Music N series of programming languages. Although these languages were powerful and influential, their laborious textual input process did pose challenges for music making. Instead, Mathews moved toward real-time systems, starting with the program Generated Real-Time Operations on Voltage-Controlled Equipment (GROOVE) around 1970 and later progressing to controllers such as his Radio Drum. When the Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) standard was introduced in the early 1980s, soon followed by the real-time digital sound synthesis of the Yamaha DX7 and the graphical user interface of the Apple Macintosh, the interest in musical interfaces skyrocketed. The 1986 International Computer Music Conference, for example, called for papers on what was considered a cutting-edge theme: real-time systems. Computer Music Journal featured various articles about interfaces—whether hardware controllers for live performance or software graphical interfaces for musical interactivity. By 2001, interest in designing new musical interfaces had grown to the extent that a workshop at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems became the first in a series of annual gatherings thenceforth known as the New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME) conference.

We are pleased to have the paper chairs of NIME 2016, Andrew McPherson and Tamara Smyth, serving as guest editors for this issue of CMJ. The articles in this issue represent extended versions of a select set of NIME 2016 papers. The Editors’ Notes provide the guest editors’ overview of these articles.

The other sections of this issue—Announcements, News, Letters, Reviews, and Products of Interest—were gathered independently of the special issue theme. The News section includes two obituaries: one for Pauline Oliveros (1932–2016) and another for Jean-Claude Risset (1938–2016). We are saddened to have lost these two trailblazers, one of them (Risset) a longstanding member of CMJ’s editorial advisory board. In the Letters to the Editor, leaders in the field reflect on their close associations with Risset. His work alongside Max Mathews at Bell Laboratories brought sound synthesis to new heights of musical sophistication, and his later compositions, such as the masterful Sud, continued to break new ground. Although these letters are not explicitly connected to the special issue’s theme, we might note Risset’s own interest in real-time interaction with computers, as evidenced, for example, by his music for the Yamaha Disklavier, a piano that both sends and receives MIDI data. The human–computer interface will clearly endure as a central concern of computer music.

—Douglas Keislar