This article, included in The Sharpest Point: Animation at the End of Cinema edited by Chris Gehman and Steve Reineke, published by XYZ Artists and the Ottawa International Film and Animation Festival, discusses some of the musical and film animation techniques and collaborative working procedures that Stephanie Maxwell and I gave employed in our six film/musical compositions. Much of the material within this article is drawn from lectures and presentations that Stephanie and I have given in artist residencies and at festivals in New Zealand, Merida, Mexico, London, Paris, New York, San Francisco, Ottawa and other cities.

This informal essay, based on some presentations I have given, discusses an important structural element in some of my recent electroacoustic compositions: pitch or rhythmic motives, sonorities or chords that are associated with a unique or particular timbre and that recur prominently in varied form and different contexts during a work. The interaction of these defining sounds helps to define a particular "energy level" and quality of movement to the work. Nineteen audio clips from the computer part of my composition Diaspora are included to illustrate concepts presented in the essay.

Melody is an often neglected, perfunctory or unsatisfactorily realized component in many electroacoustic compositions. Why? This short essay examines reasons why expressive melodic phrasing often is quite difficult to achieve in computer generated music. Five audio examples from the music of Second Sight are included.

The six chapters in this treatise provide an introduction to the sound synthesis language Csound and to Csound resources that many of us use at Eastman. Over the past few years I have heard from many non-Eastman musicians who also have found this tutorial to be useful as a "getting started" primer. This tutorial is overdue for a revision, but almost all of the information it contains is still valid.

This 200 page handbook serves as the principal textbook for my advanced computer music class. The nine chapters introduce resources available on ECMC Linux-based computer systems, with some references as well to related resources available on ECMC Windows and Macintosh systems. Much of the information in this Guide is (by design) studio-specific. However, I have been surprised and pleased to hear from some students far removed from Eastman who have stumbled across this Guide and have found it to be helpful in clarifying certain general concepts as well, and so am including this link here.