The final issue of Organised Sound Volume 5 represents the first step in what one hopes will become a fruitful long-term collaboration with the International Computer Music Association (ICMA). Selected papers from workshops and panels that formed part of the 2000 International Computer Music Conference (ICMC2000, Berlin, 27 August – 1 September) form the theme for this issue. Of the ten workshops and four panels, papers are being published representing two from each category. Obviously not all of these categories could be represented in this issue. Furthermore, it was clear that many of these workshops and panels would be difficult to translate into the form of an article.

In some informal remarks I made at a conference in 1979, I expressed a reluctance to deal with the subject of aesthetics, which historically is a product of European philosophy and which remains a troublesome concept for contemporary music where an aesthetic term such as ‘beauty’ seems to be studiously ignored (Truax 1980). In a recent, also informal article (Truax 1999) addressed as a ‘letter to a twenty-five-year old electroacoustic composer’, I predicted that the term ‘computer music’ would probably disappear since in an age where the computer is involved in nearly all electroacoustic music production, this term, which once distinguished a type of music from that made with analogue, electronic equipment, seemed today to be impossible to define rigorously. Therefore, the concept of the ‘aesthetics of computer music’, proposed as a panel discussion topic, initially seemed to me to be doubly suspect as to its meaning.

In German, the word Holzwege means ‘paths that lead nowhere but that are not inconsequential’. They are paths which, without a goal, facilitate the transforming experience of a journey that can gently, yet profoundly, touch our physical, emotional and intellectual self. In this paper, Holzwege is metaphor for a reflection on aesthetics and computer/electroacoustic music, a reflection that does not seek to demonstrate but to suggest. Thus, rather than considering and refining the abundance of concepts and definitions which seek to circumscribe the aesthetic characteristics of these musical idioms, this reflection goes beyond definitions to outline a path of no-aesthetics which highlights their creative potential.

The applications of technology in instrument design contribute to the resulting sound on many levels, particularly in the context of new evolutions representing the traditional instruments of our culture. Materials technology is seldom given consideration in the description of Western string instruments, but our choices of woods, metals and synthetics can dramatically alter the sound without altering the substance of instrumental performance. In the design of modified string instruments which mimic features of natural acoustic predecessors, new technology is applied on many levels. A taxonomy is proposed for the past, present and future of instrument design. Due consideration is given to the music which results from the new sound world, especially that involving interactive electronic processing. The advantages and disadvantages of directions in instrument design for the future are evaluated within the proposed schema. Some extended techniques on the cello are proposed to be further extended with electronics, and audio examples and descriptions are provided. A model for future collaborations between composer, performer and engineer is proposed.

Based on a composer's psycho-acoustic imagination or response to music, system dynamics modelling and simulation tools can be used as a scoring device to map the structural dynamic shape of interest of computer music compositions. The tools can also be used as a generator of compositional ideas reflecting thematic juxtaposition and emotional flux in musical narratives. These techniques allow the modelling of everyday narratives to provide a structural/metaphorical means of music composition based on archetypes that are shared with wider audiences. The methods are outlined using two examples.

In this paper the ingredients of computing auditory perception are reviewed. On the basic level there is neurophysiology, which is abstracted to artificial neural nets (ANNs) and enhanced by statistics to machine learning. There are high-level cognitive models derived from psychoacoustics (especially Gestalt principles). The gap between neuroscience and psychoacoustics has to be filled by numerics, statistics and heuristics. Computerised auditory models have a broad and diverse range of applications: hearing aids and implants, compression in audio codices, automated music analysis, music composition, interactive music installations, and information retrieval from large databases of music samples.

We compared six sound analysis/synthesis systems used for computer music. Each system analysed the same collection of twenty-seven varied input sounds, and output the results in Sound Description Interchange Format (SDIF). We describe each system individually then compare the systems in terms of availability, the sound model(s) they use, interpolation models, noise modelling, the mutability of various sound models, the parameters that must be set to perform analysis, and characteristic artefacts. Although we have not directly compared the analysis results among the different systems, our work has made such a comparison possible.