About This Issue.(Brief Article)(Editorial)

It was inevitable. Moore's Law, which describes an exponential increase in computer processing power, has turned the commodity computer into a digital audio workstation. The contemporaneous boom of the World Wide Web and computer games has made the multimedia-equipped personal computer something of an essential appliance for many consumers. As a result, a sizable portion of the general population now owns potential electronic music studios. Moreover, software tools that were once unknown outside research centers--"Music N" languages, additive and granular synthesis, the phase vocoder, and physical models, to name but a few--are now embedded in commercial or widely distributed shareware packages.

This ubiquity of digital audio technology is not without aesthetic outcomes. Practitioners of the art documented in Computer Music Journal could once rely on the technology's obscurity to circumscribe our field as an esoteric, scholarly pursuit. Computer music was generally considered a branch of "serious" 20th-century music, and it took some effort to explain our endeavors to the layperson. These days, the general populace has more than an inkling of what the term "computer music" might mean, but academia and high art are largely absent from that picture. Popular music--today's embodiment of a vernacular tradition undoubtedly as old as civilization--has spawned its own genres of electronic and computer music, most of them falling under the umbrella term "electronica."

The editors of this journal have no intention of changing the publication's artistic focus, but we do deem it useful for academic electroacoustic composers to keep abreast of trends with technology in popular music, not only to foster communication in the classroom, but also to be cognizant of a larger societal context in which one's music might be apprehended. Three articles in this issue of the Journal offer glimpses of that context. Joel Chadabe's opening essay examines relationships between the elite and popular traditions in music, and points to interactive performance software as a tool for the democratization of high art. Kim Cascone discusses ...