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Reviewer: Brad D. Reid

The focus of this work, Rowe states, “grew out of a doctoral thesis describing my own interactive system, called Cypher.” This book, together with its companion CD-ROM of audio and program examples, is a contemporary readers guide to interactive computer music systems. It could be used as an advanced reference textbook. Terminology is carefully defined throughout the book. “Interactive computer music systems are those whose behavior changes in response to musical input.” The book contains nine chapters: Interactive Music Systems Fundamentals [of MIDI handling and scheduling] Live Computer Music Music Theory Music Cognition Machine Listening Machine Composition Interactive Architectures and Artificial Intelligence Outlook An extensive list of current references and a detailed index complete the book. Cypher is best briefly described as follows: The program has two main components: a listener and a player. The listener (or analysis section) characterizes performances represented by streams of MIDI data.…The player (or composition section) generates and plays musical material. There are no stored scores associated with the program, the listener analyzes, groups, and classifies input events as they arrive in real time without matching them against any preregistered representation of any particular piece of music. The player uses various algorithmic styles to produce a musical response. Cypher “supports a style of work in which a composer can try out general ideas in a studio setting, and continually refine these toward a more precise specification suitable for use in stage performance.” Cypher is discussed in detail, and other interactive systems are reviewed briefly. The concluding “Outlook” discusses the future of designing a system that will “be able to understand the directions and goals of a human counterpart sufficiently to predict where those directions will lead and…know enough about composition to be able to reinforce the goals at the same moment that they are achieved in the human performance.” In a more philosophical vein, Rowe concludes that “the goal of incorporating humanlike music intelligence grows out of the desire to fashion computer performers able to play music with humans, not for them.” The CD-ROM for an Apple Macintosh computer with a MIDI interface brings the text to life. It contains audio examples from 20 composers for interactive computer music systems as well as a variety of software for the user to work with, including Cypher 2.0. In some cases, additional software is required, specifically Opcode Max, Common Lisp, Smalltalk, and Think C. Brief vitas of the composers and descriptions of the compositions are included in a pamphlet with the CD. The text and CD are a good reference and introduction to this complex subject.