Reviews [Editor’s note: Selected reviews are posted on the Web at mitpress2 .mit.edu/e-journals/Computer-Music -Journal/Documents/reviews/index .html. In some cases, they are either unpublished in the Journal itself or published in an abbreviated form in the Journal.] Publications Roger T. Dean, Editor: Oxford Handbook of Computer Music Hardcover, 2009, ISBN 978-0-19- 533161-5, 622 pages, illustrated, appendix, chronology, index, UK£ 85.00; Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK; telephone (+44) 1865-556767; fax: (+44) 1865-355060; electronic mail music.enquiry.uk@oup.com; Web www.oup.com/. Reviewed by Margaret Schedel Stony Brook, New York, USA The dust jacket states of the Oxford Handbook of Computer Music that the book strives to be a state-of-the- art cross section, situating computer music in the broad context of its creation and performance 50 years af- ter musical tones were produced on a computer for the first time. The edited volume contains articles on compo- sition including computer-generated acoustic music, improvisation, inter- active performance, spatialization, sound synthesis, sonification and modeling, music cognition, peda- gogy, socio-cultural topics including gender studies, history of hardware and software, dance and musical ges- ture, sensors, generative visual art and music, synesthesia, electronica, soundspotting, and personal reflec- tions on the field. This makes the book almost impossible to organize in any coherent way, and I almost wish the editor, Roger T. Dean, had placed the articles alphabetically in- stead of trying to impose order on such a wide-ranging list of topics. There are 26 articles categorized into seven subsections. I should really try to emulate Simon Emmerson and create a Venn diagram of the topics and subsections, so you can understand the futility of trying to organize this list in a linear fashion, but I’m not sure the diagram would even be legible. Mr. Dean’s “purpose in editing this book has been to facilitate access to computer music for the listener and for the future and to bring together the range of compositional, theoretical, and practical issues that a practitioner can always benefit from considering” (p. 7). I think he succeeded, but I fear the rest of this review will be as disjointed as reading the book from cover to cover. In Part One: Some Histories of Computer Music and Its Technolo- gies, Douglas Keislar’s article looks at how the computer functions as an abstraction of the instrument, the musician (composer and performer), or both. He includes a wonderful chart, which he calls an “interpretive summary” of music technology prior to the development of the computer, and characterizes computer music technology as fundamentally redefin- ing music in the 21st century, a belief that many other authors share. Paul Doornbusch discusses early hardware and its current forms in exquisite detail, and his 25-page Appendix pro- vides a global chronology of computer music. The section’s closing article by Peter Manning focuses on early sound synthesis. Although it is an excellent stand-alone article, this section is weakened by the duplication of facts. In Part Two: The Music, James Harley discusses a strange subset of computer music not often covered in these sorts of compendiums: computational approaches to notated instrumental compositions. Well- written and comprehensive, this constitutes a mini-survey within a survey of computer music. The next article takes a step in another direction completely as Roger Dean looks toward the future of musical improvisation with computers acting as partner in improvisation, or as improviser by itself. It is extremely well referenced, which is all the more impressive as the article deals mainly with the field since 2001. The next section is one of two Sounding Out collections, which are somewhat confusingly nested within the larger structure. This first one includes Trevor Wishart’s personal reflections on computer music, Tim Perkis’s thoughts on his own electronic improvisation practice with electronic/computer ensembles, and Simon Emmerson’s musings about combining the acoustic and digital worlds. Mr. Emmerson’s article is not nearly as personal as the others; it includes many diagrams to clarify his points, and ultimately reads like it could have been a chapter in his Publications 105