In this article I intend to investigate the differences and common factors between Max and Tabula Vigilans, two programs for rule-based and algorithmic composition. Before I begin this investigation, I will introduce both programs briefly.

We investigate the proof structure and models of theories of classes, where classes are ‘collections’ of entities. The theories are weaker than set theories and arise from a study of type classes in programming languages, as well as from comprehension schemata in categories. We introduce two languages of proofs: one a simple type theory and the other involving proof environments for storing and retrieving proofs. The relationship between these languages is defined in terms of a normalisation result for proofs. We use this result to define a categorical semantics for classes and establish its coherence. Finally, we show how the formal systems relate to type classes in programming languages.

The background to the creation of an international resource organisation is discussed. The author goes on to describe various activities of the Foundation, including the provision of hard-to-obtain CDs and access to other materials of interest to the electroacoustic community. The Foundation maintains a substantial presence on the World Wide Web: http://www.emf.org

We define weak inclusion systems as a natural extension of inclusion systems. We prove that several properties of factorisation systems and inclusion systems remain valid under this extension and we obtain new properties as algebraic tools in abstract model theory.

When referring to the electroacoustic community, we often picture a set of select institutions whose members are engaged in the process of music making by electronic means. This mythic community is assumed to have a unity of purpose and a common set of beliefs. However, considering the divergence of positions expressed in and around this ‘community’, we are tempted to dismiss the notion of any commonality. If we reframe our thinking and avoid transcendence to be ‘in a pure field of immanence’ (Deleuze 1988b: 7), we have the potential for a new definition of collegiality which may permit a community-in-becoming to emerge within electroacoustics.

In the early 1970s, you could have gone to Trevor Wishart's front garden on St Mary's in York and found huge slabs of steel sheeting. You could have walked into the Lyons Concert Hall of York University and found him and several other people using 20′ scaffolding poles as trumpets (now that's a great sound!). While I was still in the States in 1969, I made a 3′ diameter red gong from the hood of a truck ( = bonnet of a lorry) and could be seen striking a suspended piece of ¼“ curved steel flooring with a sledge hammer, etc. etc. Scenes like this were duplicated across the world. Why? How did it start? Sounds, sounds – the sounds were there, they wanted out. How did they get in? Anybody's guess really, but maybe a clue is what often happens while working in the studio. You've been deploying a sound and then seem to hear it at a time when playback is switched off, then realise that it's coming in from outside the building. The sounds are out there in the environment. We have ears (and other ways of sensing vibrations) and so the sounds have found a way to get inside us. Now they want out again. Composers: they just can't help it.

This article introduces the ‘Charm of Sound’ (COS) association, its purposes and activities, and gives a view of what the electroacoustic community at large means for this particular sub-community.

The theme chosen for Vol. 2 No 1 of Organized Sound is one which the editors hope will become a thread for future issues. The reader may be curious why this subject has been chosen.

Electronic music seems to be a problem for music publishers. Providing a tape for a performance is not in itself so difficult, but how do you preserve such tapes? What do you do if the musician asks for an ‘8-track ADAT’? What do you do when somebody comes back with an old 2-inch tape and tells you that there are dropouts in it? And what happens when a well-known work is requested which you, as publisher, appear not even to have in stock?

Over the past five years, a digital community of CD-ROM artists has begun to emerge. The one element that serves as the common thread to this particular community is that these artists and their works are based on a new musical presentation, one fully tied to a visual element, an interactive, exploratory world that is tailored to the individual user's progress through a finite number of elements. In short, although intermedia works have a long history, now the user may explore at his/her own pace. This unique manner of presentation has emerged into the worlds of art music, underground music, and performance art.

In this article, we give an overview of Natural Language Generation (NLG) from an applied system-building perspective. The article includes a discussion of when NLG techniques should be used; suggestions for carrying out requirements analyses; and a description of the basic NLG tasks of content determination, discourse planning, sentence aggregation, lexicalization, referring expression generation, and linguistic realisation. Throughout, the emphasis is on established techniques that can be used to build simple but practical working systems now. We also provide pointers to techniques in the literature that are appropriate for more complicated scenarios.

Conventional robotics has proved to be inflexible and non-generic. The concept of Distributed Manipulation Environment (DME) is introduced to overcome some of these shortcomings. This concept proposes a distributed approach to robotics and flexible automation. The work is concerned with modelling, simulation and event based control of DME. The modelling, conducted both at the atomic and the coupled level, is quite generic and provides a framework for static and dynamic behaviour analysis of DME systems. The simulation models serve as a mean of performance evaluation of the system on a computer before the actual implementation in real time. The event-based controller provides a simple and robust control scheme. The controller, itself, can be tested, validated and finely tuned through simulation before implementation. The feasibility of the modelling technique is demonstrated through a case study.

Natural language generation is now moving away from research prototypes into more practical applications. Generation functionality is also being asked to play a more significant role in established applications such as machine translation. In both cases, multilingual generation techniques have much to offer. However, the take-up of multilingual generation is being restricted by a critical lack both of large-scale linguistic resources suited to the generation task and of appropriate development environments. This paper describes KPML, a multilingual development environment that offers one possible solution to these problems. KPML aims to provide generation projects with standardized, broad-coverage, reusable resources and a basic engine for using such resources for generation. A variety of focused debugging aids ensure efficient maintenance, while supporting multilingual work such as contrastive language development and automatic merging of independently developed resources. KPML is based on a new, generic approach to multilinguality in resource description that extends significantly beyond previous approaches. The system has already been used in a number of large generation projects and is freely available to the generation community.

Inequalities for martingales with bounded differences have recently proved to be very useful in combinatorics and in the mathematics of operational research and computer science. We see here that these inequalities extend in a natural way to ‘centering sequences’ with bounded differences, and thus include, for example, better inequalities for sequences related to sampling without replacement.