About This Issue

Abstract

In this issue’s first article, Mark Zaki interviews Hubert Howe, who has been an active composer of computer music for over half a century. As a graduate student at Princeton University in the 1960s, Howe co-developed the Music 4B program, an antecedent of Csound. The interview progresses from his early years in the field through to his current directorship of the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival. Howe details some of his compositional techniques, including the use of pitch arrays in his electronic and acoustic pieces, as well as his approach to timbre in computer music. Curtis Roads, a former editor of this journal, is well known for his long career in microsound composition, including his creation of the first computer implementation of granular sound synthesis. In this issue, he and his co-authors describe their recent software for real-time interactive granular synthesis. As is typical in granular synthesis, the program operates on sound files rather than real-time audio input; but the user has real-time control of many synthesis parameters. Unlike much granular synthesis software, the system offers per-grain processing, which means that each grain can have a unique set of values—specifically, for envelope, waveform, amplitude, frequency, spatial position, and filtering. The authors also emphasize their design of the graphical user interface. By