The collection of papers in this issue of Organised Sound results from a call for material focused on the theme of music technology in Australasia (New Zealand, Australia and neighbouring Islands of the South Pacific) and South East Asia (Brunei, Burma, Indonesia, Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam).

Music technology work in Southeast Asia faces challenges unique to this region. Economic, religious and cultural factors hinder its progress. Despite these factors, pockets of development have occurred, most notably in Singapore and Malaysia. Academic programmes have been introduced; strides have been made in research and development; and commercially viable music technology products have been invented and marketed. Various centres in the region are active in music technology-related work: the Music Department at Universiti Putra Malaysia, the Electronic Music Lab at the National University of Singapore, and Creative Resource at the International Business Park in Singapore. The First International Music Technology Conference in Southeast Asia held in Kuala Lumpur recently received lukewarm response in terms of turnout and contributions. People from this region have produced a relatively small number of music technology-related publications. Music technology work in Southeast Asia can thus be said to be in its infancy with small but significant steps being taken to expand; however, for the region to become a major contributor on the international level, the various hindrances identified will need to be addressed and overcome.

Dealing predominantly with ‘art music’ aspects of electroacoustic music practice, this paper looks at cultural, aesthetic, environmental and technical influences on current and emerging practices from the upper half of the North Island of New Zealand. It also discusses the influences of Asian and Pacific cultures on the idiom locally. Rather than dwell on the similarities with current international styles, the focus is largely on some of the differences.

This article traces the evolution of electroacoustic music in Wellington and the South Island of New Zealand. Electroacoustic music has a well-established tradition in New Zealand, dating back to Douglas Lilburn's pioneering work in the early 1960s. The Victoria University of Wellington Electronic Music Studios (VUW/EMS) that Lilburn established in 1966 became a focal point for electronic music activities in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This article examines current approaches to electroacoustic music composition, and discusses the facilities at Victoria University, the University of Canterbury and the University of Otago.

Using his own experience of forty-three professional engagements over a period of a year, most of which involved performances on a laptop computer, the author examines the nature of the ‘musical scenes’ into which involvement with computer music has led him. The author contends that the social nature of ‘computer music’ is changing not only because of changes in the technology, but also because of a number of social factors, some of which are examined in this article.

On 31 December 1999 the La Trobe University Music Department closed its doors. From the outset, La Trobe Music saw itself as providing an alternative tertiary music education to the predominant paradigms of the time by fostering creativity through composition, technology, improvisation and other types of alternative performance practices. The philosophy of teaching electroacoustic music at La Trobe was to encourage students to find their own compositional voice rather than preach a particular style of electroacoustic music. The Department's research areas were in improvisation and technology, signal processing, gestural control devices, computer-assisted composition, analysis of electroacoustic music, realtime DSP, live electronics and installations. La Trobe's excellence in electroacoustic music was recognised by its inclusion in a survey of the world's top twenty-three computer music institutions by the Japanese journal Intercommunication 6. La Trobe staff and postgraduate students contributed papers and compositions to international and national computer music conferences and La Trobe was very much a part of the international community for over twenty-five years. The challenge now is for other Victorian institutions to meet the needs of today's students and to provide the deep research foundation in electroacoustic music that informs teaching and generates new music directions in the community.

This paper gives a personal perspective on the application and relevance of generative processes to art production. This view is that of a computer programmer, rather than that of a user of computer programs written (or hardware constructed) by others. The programmer is in the unique position of being able to describe and manipulate abstract processes which may be used as a unique means of artistic expression. This gives a greater amount of freedom to the programmer/artist than is the case when he or she is limited by programmed procedures defined by others.

Prior to the development of a formal means of specifying visual and aural events, a concrete machine or set of rules for their manipulation and a means of bringing these representations back into the world as physical events, abstract processes were things to be contemplated but not experienced. Musical and spatial notations employed by artists, engineers and others, in concert with the programming of computing hardware, have opened the way for those who wish to manipulate processes in their artistic practice.

In order to focus study and practice in the area of such generative computer art, the Center for Electronic Media Art (CEMA) has been established in Melbourne, Australia. The Center has spawned an international conference series on generative/process-based electronic art called Iteration. The perceived roles of the Center and Iteration conferences are discussed in this paper.

This article is a brief survey of academic computer music activities in New South Wales.

Ian Fredericks played a prominent role in the development of Australian electronic music and mixed media composition from the mid 1970s until 2001. His work in establishing both the SEUSS electronic music studio at Sydney University and the subsequent founding of the computer music and audio-visual composition and performance group watt with Martin Wesley-Smith in 1976, paved the way for the generations of artists that have since explored this field. The author presents lightly edited excerpts from the last interview with Ian Fredericks before his passing on 15 March 2001.

A survey is presented of developments in recent Western Australian electronic music, focusing on the geographical influence on local composers' work. The article follows specific cases of practitioners in the fields of Sound Art (Alan Lamb and Hannah Clemen), Live Electronics (Cathie Travers and the electronic music quartet Magnetic Pig), Interactive Electronics (Jonathan Mustard and Lindsay Vickery) and Noise/Lo Fi Electronics (Cat Hope and Lux Mammoth).

Although music uses sound as its medium of conveyance, music is not just sound. Although musical structures rely on the acoustics of sound-generating devices (instruments) and conveyances (concert halls, loudspeakers) and on the way the body senses the sound waves generated and transformed by these (psychoacoustics), theories of musical composition can work both with and against these principles. Music is involved in sonic discourse, sonic rhetoric, if you will, and history shows us that because of this it is a sociocultural phenomenon which reflects the times in which it is composed.

Concerning this issue's theme, we have received the following materials:

Conference Proceedings from the Australasian Computer Music Conference 1999, ‘Imaginary Spaces’ (Victoria University of Wellington) and 2000, ‘InterFaces’ (Queensland University of Technology). For further information on conferences, please refer to <http://www.acma.asn.au/conferences.html>. MikroPolyphone also publishes selected conference papers and other articles: <http://farben.latrobe.edu.au/mikropol/>.