The Oxford Handbook of Computer Music

Since the first musical tones were produced on a computer in 1950, composers of computer music have produced a major body of creative works, and today the field has its own canon and accepted modes of analysis and pedagogy. As technologies improve and become increasingly available, the cost of performances - both live solo and networked - and studio composition have fallen sharply. The Oxford Handbook of Computer Music fills this gap by providing a state-of-the-art cross-section of the most field-defining topics and debates in the field of computer music today. A unique contribution to the field, it situates computer music in the broad context of its creation and performance across the full range of issues - from music cognition to pedagogy to sociocultural analyses - that crop up in contemporary discourse in the field. It focuses not only on art music, but also on the important movements of microsonics, the computer DJ, and computer-interactive performance more broadly

1. - Introduction: The many futures of computer music
2. - A historical view of computer music technology
3. - Early hardware and early ideas in computer music - their development and their current forms
4. - Sound synthesis using computers
5. - Computational approaches to composition of notated instrumental music: Xenakis and the other pioneers
6. - Envisaging improvisation in future computer music
7. - Computer music: some reflections
8. - Some notes on my electronic improvisation practice
9 - Combining the acoustic and the digital: music for instruments and computers or pre-recorded sound
10. - Dancing the music: interactive dance and music
11. - Gesture and morphology in laptop music performance
12. - Sensor based musical Instruments and interactive music
13. - Spatialisation and computer music
14. - The voice in computer music and its relationship to place, identity and community
15. - Algorithmic synaesthesia
16 - An introduction to data sonification
17. - Electronica
18. - Generative algorithms for making music: emergence, evolution and ecosystems
19 - Computational modelling of music cognition and musical creativity
20. - Soundspotting: a new kind of process?
21. - Interactivity and improvisation
22. - From outside the window: electronic sound performance
23. - Empirical studies of computer sound
24. - Toward the gender ideal
24. - Sound-based music 4 all
25 - Framing learning perspectives in computer music education

Roger Dean is Research Professor of Sonic Communication at the University of Western Sydney, and Founder and Artistic Director of austraLYSIS. He is also author of Hyperimprovisation: Computer Interactive Sound Improvisation (2003) and Sounds from the Corner: Australian Contemporary Jazz Since 1973 (2005)