About This Issue

Computer Music Journal 37:2 included an article analyzing audio feedback systems in various musical compositions. One of the article’s authors, Dario Sanfilippo, went on to write a Ph.D. thesis in this area. In the current issue, he presents a pair of articles based in part on his dissertation research. The first of these considers musical feedback using concepts and vocabulary from the field of complex adaptive systems. That field concerns nonlinear dynamical systems that are complex, in that their behavior may not be predictable from the behavior of individual components within the system, and adaptive, in that the behavior changes over time in response to events. Sanfilippo also draws upon the philosophical concept of radical constructivism, presenting as a case study his own composition Constructing Realities. His companion article elucidates technical aspects of the signal-processing algorithms he implemented for this work. These algorithms analyze the short-term or long-term information in audio streams, such as those captured in a live performance that uses a feedback model. This issue’s third article concerns the psychoacoustics of spatialization—specifically, how