The theme chosen for Vol. 2 No 1 of Organized Sound is one which the editors hope will become a thread for future issues. The reader may be curious why this subject has been chosen.

When referring to the electroacoustic community, we often picture a set of select institutions whose members are engaged in the process of music making by electronic means. This mythic community is assumed to have a unity of purpose and a common set of be liefs. However, considering the divergence of positions expressed in and around this ‘community’, we are tempted to dismiss the notion of any commonality. If we reframe our thinking and avoid transcendence to be ‘in a pure field of immanence’ (Deleuze 1988b: 7), we have the potential for a new definition of collegiality which may permit a community-in-becoming to emerge within electroacoustics.

Over the past five years, a digital community of CD-ROM artists has begun to emerge. The one element that serves as the common thread to this particular community is that these artists and their works are based on a new musical presentation, one fully tied to a visual element, an interactive, exploratory world that is tailored to the individual user's progress through a finite number of elements. In short, although intermedia works have a long history, now the user may explore at his/her own pace. This unique manner of presentation has emerged into the worlds of art music, underground music, and performance art.

Electronic music seems to be a problem for music publishers. Providing a tape for a performance is not in itself so difficult, but how do you preserve such tapes? What do you do if the musician asks for an ‘8-track ADAT’? What do you do when s omebody comes back with an old 2-inch tape and tells you that there are dropouts in it? And what happens when a well-known work is requested which you, as publisher, appear not even to have in stock?

This article introduces the ‘Charm of Sound’ (COS) association, its purposes and activities, and gives a view of what the electroacoustic community at large means for this particular sub-community.

The background to the creation of an international resource organisation is discussed. The author goes on to describe various activities of the Foundation, including the provision of hard-to-obtain CDs and access to other materials of interest to the electroacoustic community. The Foundation maintains a substantial presence on the World Wide Web: http://www.emf.org

In the early 1970s, you could have gone to Trevor Wishart's front garden on St Mary's in York and found huge slabs of steel sheeting. You could have walked into the Lyons Concert Hall of York University and found him and several other people using 20′ scaffolding poles as trumpets (now that's a great sound!). While I was still in the States in 1969, I made a 3′ diameter red gong from the hood of a truck ( = bonnet of a lorry) and could be seen striking a suspended piece of ¼“ curved steel flooring with a sledge hammer, etc. etc. Scenes like this were duplicated across the world. Why? How did it start? Sounds, sounds – the sounds were there, they wanted out. How did they get in? Anybody's guess really, but maybe a clue is what often happens while working in the studio. You've been deploying a sound and then seem to hear it at a time when playback is switched off, then realise that it's coming in from outside the building. The sounds are out there in the environment. We have ears (and other ways of sensing vibrations) and so the sounds have found a way to get inside us. Now they want out again. Composers: they just can't help it.

The conceptual basis of the UPIC system is described and discussed, in particular its relation to the work of its orginator, Iannis Xenakis, to the science of acoustics and to the development of an intuitive graphic imagery. A possible pedagogical approac h to musical creation using the resources of the UPIC is developed, and the particular pedagogical ethos of the system is emphasised. There follows a detailed description of the practical arrangements for a number of different workshop situations using the UPIC system in which the author has participated, and an evaluation of the outcomes of using the system in this way.

In this article I intend to investigate the differences and common factors between Max and Tabula Vigilans, two programs for rule-based and algorithmic composition. Before I begin this investigation, I will introduce both programs briefly.