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Paris-based Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho died on 2 June 2023 at the age of 70. She is known for seamlessly integrating acoustic and electronic sounds and techniques, both in the musical score and in the compositional process—not only integrating fixed media and live electronics with acoustic instruments in elegant and organic ways but also using computer analysis of acoustic sounds to inform the harmony and other properties of a composition, in the spectralist tradition. Born in Helsinki in 1952 and trained at the Sibelius Academy there, Saariaho attended the Darmstadt Summer Courses and moved to Germany to study with Brian Ferneyhough and Klaus Huber. Inspired by French spectralist composers Tristan Murail and Gerard Grisey, she moved to Paris in 1982, where she began exploring approaches to incorporating electronics into acoustic classical music at l'Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM).Her work received much acclaim; for example, she was the fourth winner of the Prix Ars Electronica in 1989, and her opera, l'Amour de loin, won the 2003 Grawenmeyer award and a Grammy in 2011. It was also the second opera written by a female composer to be performed by the New York City Metropolitan Opera (the first since 1903). A 2019 BBC Music Magazine poll asked 174 composers to name the greatest composers of all time, and Saariaho was the highest-ranked living composer in the resulting list. Several Finnish musicians celebrated Saariaho's 70th birthday in a series of 22 events in fall 2022. Besides a long list of compositions, her legacy and contributions to upcoming musicians also include sponsoring the creation of a new organ for the Helsinki Music Centre and chairing its organ composition competition.A statement by Saariaho's husband and fellow IRCAM composer Jean-Baptiste Barrière and their two children praised her grace and determination in struggling with glioblastoma, an aggressive type of brain cancer, and expressed their wish to bring attention to the importance of public health and accessibility considerations in cultural venues. Max patches accompanying 35 of Saariaho's works are available for study and performance on her website.Web: saariaho.orgClarence Barlow passed away 29 June 2023 at the age of 77. The news reached Computer Music Journal just as the editorial deadlines for this issue were closing. We will include an obituary with further details in the following issue.Selecting from over 1,400 submissions from more than 70 countries, Le Cube Garges and École des Arts Décoratifs presented the 28th International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA), 16–21 May 2023, at the Forum des Images in Paris, France, with over 50 associated presentations at partner venues throughout France continuing until 15 September. The conference invited submissions addressing the theme of symbiosis, with subthemes on “The Planet's Next Inhabitants,” “New Alliances,” and “Inventing Worlds.” Sessions were organized under such interdisciplinary and thought-provoking themes as post-human agency, ecosystems and climate change, museums and curation, architecture and territories, bioart and biodesign, (re)invented alliances, and robots and expanded corporealities.Keynote speakers included Ionat Zurr discussing “Symbiosis and the Fallacy of a Nature-Free Existence” with lessons from the SymbioticA biological arts laboratory, Vikto Ruban shared the roles of art in the Russia–Ukraine war, and Michael Century used observations from Canada's position in the early digital revolution to illuminate current developments in technology. Roger Malina took a novel approach to “disremembering” media art curator Peter Weibel (who died in March 2023). Invited round table discussions included Fondation Daniel et Nina Carasso on the notion of an ecology of practices and the French Centre National du Cinéma et de l'Image Animée on public funding for digital art.Web: isea2023.isea-international.orgThe seventh International Conference on Live Coding (ICLC) took place 19–23 April 2023 in Utrecht, The Netherlands. With a theme of “Displacement,” keynote speakers included Kate Sicchio on using live coding to resituate humans amid technology and Marije Baalman on framing live coding as “thinking inside the box.” Presentations included approaches to live coding using Python, SuperCollider, and Lisp. Among the novel approaches shown at the conference, Matthew Kaney, William Christopher Payne, and Amy Hurst addressed the challenges of live coding for blind and visually impaired people, sharing their experiences forming a live coding ensemble with blind or visually impaired high school students, and Leonard Geier, Paul Methfessel, Tom Beckmann, and Robert Hirschfeld presented a paper and installation exploring “asymmetric performance” utilizing live coding and virtual reality together.Web: iclc.toplap.org/2023Northeastern University, Bard College, and the New England Conservatory hosted the eighth International Conference on Technologies for Music Notation and Representation (TENOR), 15–17 May 2023, in Boston, Massachusetts, focused on a theme of “Representation and Perception of Music Structure.” As keynote speakers, Morwaread Farbood presented her Graphical Score Interface software, intended to allow people at all levels of training to create and analyze music through an intelligent system informed by models of music cognition, and Holly Watkins discussed the representation of animal song. The conference also included keynote workshops by Tim Perkins, who cofounded the early network band, the Hub, in 1986, and percussionist, composer, and visual artist Gino Robair. Other workshops included Georg Hajdu on using MaxScore with microtonal ensembles, Ryan Smith on animated notation, and Shane McKenna on graphic notation for young students.Among the four concerts, Rob Hamilton's “Elegy (Ready, Set, Rapture)” featured Coretet, a virtual reality musical instrument using Unreal Engine; Cecilia Suhr performed “Eastern Praxis,” an interactive graphic score interpreted by Suhr playing instruments from several world cultures; Xavier Davenport's “GuitaRPG” drew on role-playing games for its structure; Eugene Markin's “Survival Kit” merged poetry and live coding in a text-driven interface; and Iran Sanadzadeh used machine learning gesture recognition on a pressure-sensitive floor to manipulate a graphic score for musicians to interpret.Guest ensemble Loadbang performed animated graphic scores by Motoki Ohkubo and Sebastian Adams and a piece by Jaslyn Robertson using lighting and multichannel audio as the score, reflecting on past compositions that have gone unperformed due to discrimination. The Callithumpian Consort performed three works, including Kitty Xiao's “Tendons for Transformation,” which uses tactile transducers, contact microphones, and video to interconnect the performers’ actions and their instruments’ resonances in a tangled performance scenario.Web: tenorboston23.sites.northeastern.eduGenerative AI and HCI Workshop (GenAICHI) took place 28 April 2023 online, as part of the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Among the 22 presentations, which mostly focused on large language models like ChatGPT, Tae Soo Kim, Arghya Sarkar, Yoonjoo Lee, Minsuk Chang, and Juho Kim presented LMCanvas, a node-based environment for prompt engineering, and Deepak Giri and Erin Brady, while considering technology concerns among people with autism spectrum disorder, presented opportunities for utilizing deepfake techniques to ameliorate challenges in online interpersonal communication (such as maintaining eye contact) and human–computer interaction.Web: generativeaiandhci.github.ioSupported by the French Ministry of Culture and Communication, the Association Francophone d'Informatique Musicale presented the 30th Journées d'Informatique Musicale. Among its four concerts was a tribute to Horacio Vaggione, celebrating his 80th birthday, with a keynote presentation by Curtis Roads. Florence Levé gave the other keynote presentation, on the challenges of analyzing and formalizing musical texture symbolically. Nine sessions addressed spatialization (including recent developments in GRIS tools); brain interfaces; structures in harmony and counterpoint; historical developments surrounding John Chowning, IRCAM, and late-1960s Marseilles; a session building on ISEA's recent theme of symbiosis; and six demonstrations of networked music approaches. A roundtable session discussed educational and societal issues in teaching computer music in middle school and high school. Following a vote by all participants, the Young Researcher prize went to Aliénor Golvet, for a distributed instrument for studying collective improvisation, and Ulysse Del Gingharo, for using an EEG device toward a “sonification of attention.”Web: jim2023.sciencesconf.orgThe Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States (SEAMUS) held its annual conference 7–8 April 2023 in New York City, with concerts in the DiMenna Center and paper presentations, workshops, panel discussions, and installations in New York University Music Department facilities. The event was augmented by four “rhizomatic” remote events hosted by Louisiana State University, the University of Georgia, the University of Louisville, and Wayne State University.Among the ten concerts, Hubert Howe's “Inharmonic Fantasy No. 17” used a compressed harmonic series by shifting it down by a ratio of 9/24. Sam Pluta's “Matrix” used Silent Brass mutes on two trombones so that the audience only hears electronically manipulated versions of the live instruments and never their original sound. Badie Khaleghian's “Electric Sky Blue” featured pianist and movement artist Caroline Owen amid an immersive projection. Brian Lindgren's “Etudes and Vignettes” explored a 3-D-printed instrument in development called the EV, which transformed acoustic sound with FFT convolution. Ryan Carter's “A Limited Number of Contributions” involved the audience selecting sounds by shaking and tilting their mobile phones, with those sounds coordinated by a central server over time. Roderick Coover and Adam Vidiksis presented “It Will Happen Here: Estuaries” as a preconcert installation, a mobile video and sound preview of their immersive artwork series.For the ASCAP–SEAMUS award, first prize went to Timothy Roy for “dans les dents de la guivre” for harp, multichannel sound, and lighting, and second prize went to Ali Can Puskulcu for “was passiert?”, a reflection on life in a pandemic, for accordion, clarinet, cello and electronics with video accompaniment. Quijiang Levi Lu and Connor Scroggins were finalists in the competition.Web: seamusonline.org/2023-conference-april-7-8-nyc

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