Letter From The Guest Editors

Abstract

The field of Computer Music is as old as the field of Computer Science itself: as early as 1951, the CSIR Mk1 computer was programmed to play a musical tune at the first public exhibition of the computer at the inaugural Conference of Automatic Computing Machines in Sydney, Australia. The computer's tunes were crude and unremarkable compared to what is possible with modern computer technology. However, they probably were the first computer music ever and more importantly, the means of production was at the leading edge of technological sophistication at the time. Since then the field of Computer Music has made tremendous progress, most of which is taken for granted today. Computer applications in music are almost ubiquitous in modern society and economy, ranging from Internet distribution of music, personal players and digital radios, to systems for automatic music accompaniment and computer-aided composition.