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Composer and data scientist Donald Alvin Byrd died on 22 October 2024 at the age of 78. Born 4 September 1946 in Chicago, Illinois, Byrd studied music composition at Indiana University and earned a PhD in computer science, supervised by Douglas Hofstadter. Byrd used his System for Music Transcription (SMUT) software from his dissertation work to create the music notation examples in Hofstadter's seminal book, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (1979), which won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. Byrd's seminal work in computerized music notation continued at Princeton University and as the principal designer for the music notation program Nightingale. Byrd also worked in information retrieval in text and music, focusing on visualization and human.computer interaction, and he co-founded the International Symposium on Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR) in 2000, with funding from the National Science Foundation. Byrd's legacy was honored in a special session during the 25th ISMIR conference hosted in San Francisco, California.Web: homes.luddy.indiana.edu/donbyrdComposer, producer, and new music advocate Norma Beecroft died on 19 October 2024 at the age of 90. Born to Julian Balfour Beecroft, musician and pioneer in electronic tape recording, and Eleanor Beecroft, an actress trained in music and dance, on 11 April 1934 in Oshawa, Ontario, Canada, Norma studied at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto, Ontario, then in Rome, Italy, attending lectures by Bruno Maderna in Darmstadt, Germany. Starting in 1962, Beecroft completed her studies at the University of Toronto Electronic Music Studio (UTEMS), which had just been founded in 1959, and moved to New York City in 1964 to work with Mario Davidovsky at the Columbia—Princeton Electronic Music Center. Beecroft worked in radio and television at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in the 1950s through the 1970s, in many roles including producing several music-related programs, including hosting the Music of Today series and producing a documentary titled The Computer in Music in 1976. Beecroft returned to UTEMS as faculty 1967–1976, taught electronic music and composition at York University 1984–1987. Beecroft's legacy in new music advocacy continues in New Music Concerts, which she co-founded with Robert Aitken in 1971.Web: www.newmusicconcerts.com/honouring-the-life-and-legacy-of-norma-beecroftComposer alcides lanza died on 17 July 2024 at the age of 95. Born in Rosario, Santa Fe Province, Argentina, on 2 June 1929, lanza studied composition with Alberto Ginastera in Buenos Aires, won a Guggenheim fellowship in 1965, and moved to the United States to study with Olivier Messiaen, Aaron Copland, and Bruno Maderna, as well as working with Vladimir Ussachevsky at the Columbia—Princeton Electronic Music Center in the late 1960s. In 1971, lanza joined the faculty at McGill University and directed its Electronic Music Studio 1974–2003. In 2019, lanza was named a Member of the Order of Canada.Web: cmccanada.org/alcides-lanza-june-2-1929-july-17-2024The Destellos Foundation has announced the results of the 16th Competition of Acousmatic Composition. From 88 composers in the initial round, First Prize went to Alexis Blais for “Skand.”Web: fundaciondestellos0.wixsite.com/fundacion-destellosThe MA/IN Festival has announced the winners of its 2024 awards, selected from 443 submissions from 47 countries. Alexis Blais won the Acousmatic Award for “animal_farm,” Nahuel Eduardo Litwin won the Mixed Media Award for “Close your eyes and see,” and Fabio Machiavelli won the Live Performance and Sound Art Award for “Machines Inside Me.”Web: www.mainfest.it/main24awardsThe Canadian Electroacoustic Community (CEC) presented the 25th Jeu de temps [Times Play] awards for electroacoustic music artists from or living in Canada, selected from works submitted from 51 artists living in Canada, Austria, France, Italy, and Norway. Dominic Sambucco won First Prize and the Jean Piché Award for videomusic, new media, and creative coding for “re.azioni,” Findlay Sontag won the Hildegard Westerkamp Award for soundscape and sound installation for “Pushpull,” Marie-Andrée Pellerin won the Micheline Coulombe Saint-Marcoux Award for self-identified female or non-binary electroacoustic artists for “Close Conversations of Other Kinds,” Nicolas Bourgeois won the Martin Gotfrit and Martin Bartlett Award for live electroacoustic practices for “Nœuds au ventre,” Rob Gill won the Barry Truax Award for environmental or ecological audio practices for “HPB9: composition 2,” Philippe Macnab-Séguin won the Yves Gigon Award for the most outrageous electroacoustic work for “Gone for Eggs,” and Sylvi MacCormac won the jef chippewa Award for Indigenous cultural background for “Russell Wallace Qekiyeksut, an Echo Acoustic Portrait.”Web: jttp.sonus.ca/2024The Center for Research in Electro-Acoustic Music and Audio (CREAMA) at the Hanyang University College of Music hosted the 49th International Computer Music Conference in Seoul, South Korea, 7–13 July 2024, with a theme of “Sound in Motion,” considering microscopic and macroscopic motion in sound, musical performance, and even computers. Keynote speakers included Tae Hong Park and and Atau Tanaka reflecting on personal paths of discovery in computer music and Laetitia Sonami using Greek mythology to ponder artificial intelligence with the title, “Repetition and Desire: Echo, Narcissus, AI, and I.”The Best Paper Award went to Nick Hwang and Anthony Marasco for “MoNoDeC: The Mobile Node Controller for audience-involved sound diffusion” and also to Matthew Barnard, Adam Martin, and Mark Slater, who discussed a site-specific composition integrating Ambisonics recording and real-time spatialization with the acoustic properties of the Hull Minster church in Yorkshire, England. Nicola Fumo Frattegiani won the Best Music Award for “Luar,” a fixed-media audiovisual setting of text by Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, and Dariush Derakhshani won the Best Student Music Award for “Pulsar Rays,” an acousmatic work praised by the judges for its maturity, engaging form over time, and intriguing use of timbre and space with an allusion to echolocation by dolphins and bats.Web: www.icmc2024.org

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