On behalf of the International Computer Music Association (ICMA), parent organization of the ICMC. It is my true pleasure to welcome you to Barcelona, to participate in the 2005 conference, under the theme; "Free Sound."

The first ICMC was held at Michigan State University in 1974. Since that time the ICMC and ICMA have grown and expanded as we offer conferences each year. We have circled the globe many times to meet in Europe, Asia, and North America. We have also been able to offer more and more programs and support for composers, researchers, students, and fans of computer music. Our commissions process supports compositions, installations, and recordings of new computer music works. Our Journal of New Music Research Distinguished Paper Award, and the ICMA Best Presentation Award honor exceptional research writing and presentations at the conferences. The commitment of the ICMA board is strong to continue improving our organization, increasing benefits and programs for members, and supporting future organizers of the ICMC.

As we find ourselves gathered in Barcelona, we can be proud of the continuingly international nature of the computer music community. Our field is truly well represented and showcased in this historical city of art, architecture, food, academics, and business. We are truly fortunate to be hosted at UPF by one of the foremost computer music research groups in the world, and also by the artistically stellar Phonos music foundation.

Our hosts have worked tirelessly to put together a fantastic program. We look forward to enjoying the fruits of all their hard work, and enjoying the pleasures and charms of their wonderful city.

Perry R. Cook
President
International Computer Music Association
http://www.computermusic.org

Welcome from the Chairs of the ICMC-2005

We would like to welcome everyone to this year's International Computer Music Conference, hosted in Barcelona by the Phonos Foundation, the Pompeu Fabra University and the Higher School of Music of Catalonia (ESMUC) from the 4th to the 10th of September of 2005.

With a history that spans more than 30 years the ICMC is a unique gathering of specialists that share interest for the interdisciplinary subject of Computer Music, coming from a wide variety of scientific, technological and artistic fields. The ICMC is the only international conference where all the different aspects of Computer Music simultaneously converge making it possible to experience the most stimulating and enriching mix of methodologies, approaches and advances within the field. We are proud to be able to host this year ICMC in Barcelona. An artistic city renown for its cultural attractions, Barcelona is fast becoming a place of reference for Computer Music. This preeminence is mainly due to the pioneering and continuing support of the Phonos Foundation for electroacoustic music, for the research strength at the Pompeu Fabra University and, more recently, for the creation of the Higher School of Music of Catalonia. There is a strong partnership between these institutions and they have now joined forces to organize the best possible ICMC conference for the global Computer Music community. It is a tradition of each ICMC to have a theme. We chose free sound as this year's leitmotif, thus aiming to emphasize the idea of freeing sound from its current aesthetic, technical and legal confines. It is our aim to facilitate and promote open discussion about the extent to which sound is considered a community asset -- an asset that belongs to society and cannot be privatized. Thus, we encouraged contributions that emphasized these and related topics. You will see the influence of this theme throughout the conference program. We made an open call for participation in the ICMC-2005, which included the main submission categories of music pieces and papers. We had an amazing response; there were 372 music submissions and 309 paper submissions. From the music submissions the international music panel selected 67 pieces for the concerts and 58 pieces for the listening sessions and 4 installations. In parallel, the program committee coordinated the paper review process and from all the submissions, 105 were accepted for oral presentations, 55 for poster presentations and 50 to be presented as demonstrations. On top of that the organizing committee added 13 pieces and 3 installations to be presented at the conference as local selections. Composer Nicola Bernardini, a well-known figure in the Computer Music community, will give the keynote lecture. With the evocative title of "Sound was Born Free" Bernardini will try to answer questions such as: What's Freedom got to do with Sound? What is the relationship between Freedom and Computer Music? and Where does our community come into play? You can expect to hear a very inspiring talk.

The day before the conference begins we have organized 5 workshops, each one covering a particular topic in a tutorial fashion. Adam Lindsay is coordinating one of the workshops on "Audio Mosaicing: Feature-Driven Audio Editing/Synthesis". Roger B. Dannenberg and Ross Bencina will be talking about "Real-Time Systems Concepts for Computer Music". Rick Taube will give a practical workshop on "Spectral Composition and Algorithmic Design". Maarten de Boer and Pau Arum� will also give a practical session on "Audio Production with Free Software Tools". Finally �lvaro Barbosa, Scot Gresham-Lancaster, Jason Freeman and Ross Bencina will give an overview of "Networked Music". These workshops promise to provide an exciting opportunity to have an in depth introduction to key topic in our field. Panel discussions will take place on each day of the conference. Martin Kaltenbrunner is moderating one on "Tangible Musical Interfaces", Joel Chadabe one on "Interactive Musical Instruments", Xavier Amatriain one on "Free Software to Free Sound", Margaret Schedel one on "Gender and Computer Music: Tracing Change" and finally one panel will be moderated by Roberto Bresin on "Software tools for expressive music performance". All panels aim to provide an interesting forum for those wishing to participate in discussions on these topics. Apart from the traditional participation calls of the ICMC conferences we made a call, together with the S2S� project of the EU, for inspirational ideas. In doing so, our intention is to provide a forum where researchers or composers can put forward a preliminary idea on any aspect related to computer music and where others in turn share their reactions and provide feed back. The presented ideas could be musical, technical, scientific, theoretical, practical... the only restriction was that they had to be original and inspired; no proofs, results, or developed systems were required. We received 35 submissions of which we have accepted 20 and they will be presented in a non-conventional conference venue. We can expect some exciting unconventional presentations that may provide a glimpse of the future of Computer Music. An initiative of the Music Technology Group of the UPF for the ICMC was The Freesound Project; an internet community supporting free exchange of sounds by musicians, sound artists and researchers. Sounds contributed by community members are publicly available on that site under the Creative Commons "Sampling+" License - a license allowing most uses of the sounds provided that the source is acknowledged. The site was opened on April 5th 2005 and after being online for three months it had already reached more than 7.500 registered users, more than 3.500 contributed sounds, more than 180.000 downloads of sounds and it is already becoming a useful tool for the international music community. At the ICMC there will be a number of activities related to this project, one will be an open seminar on Mosaicing and The FreeSound Project where people that have developed software tools to access The FreeSound Project to create music by Mosaicing will present their projects. There will also be some competitions around The FreeSound Project. The Off-ICMC is becoming a tradition of the ICMC. As usual it will take place at night, at an alternative music venue and as usual it will consist of concerts covering alternative experimental electronic music representing musical aspects typically absent in the official ICMC concerts (e.g. improvisation, laptop electronica, vj-ing, etc.). From the informal invitation we made, we got 52 proposals of which 15 were selected; afterwards, several additional artists were specially invited by the committee panel. There will be six concerts, starting at around 10 PM from Monday to Saturday and with three sets taking place every night, in the trendy Metr�nom Foundation, located downtown Barcelona. The same Metr�nom Foundation will also host some music installations during the whole week. We got very exciting submissions from three continents, covering a wide variety of aesthetics, and we are convinced that you will not want to miss them; and we hope that the events that have been scheduled first thing in morning will not suffer in attendance levels!

There will also be quite a few more things that will happen at the ICMC that we have not detailed here. You will just have to be there to experience them! The organization of the conference has been more demanding than we could have ever imagined but we are excited to present this program to you the International Music Community. As your conference we sincerely hope that you make the most of your time here in Barcelona to participate in what will hopefully be an event to be remembered.

We greatfully acknowledge the support given by the ICMA board members and particularly Mary Simoni, past President, Perry Cook, current President, Mara Helmuth, Vice-President for Conferences, and Michael Alcorn, Music Coordinator. We also thank our sponsors, especially SGAE-Iberautor, the City of Barcelona (ICUB), the Generalitat of Catalunya (Department of Culture) and the Ministries of Culture and Education. We also wish to thank Yamaha, Roland and Adagio for supplying equipment for the event. Finally we wish to acknowledge the real organizers of the ICMC in Barcelona, the members of Music Technology Group of the UPF, the members of the Sonology Department and the staff of ESMUC. Without all these people such a large event would be just a dream.

Welcome to Barcelona and enjoy ICMC 2005.

Andr�s Lewin-Ritcher, General Chair
Xavier Serra, Program Chair