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[Editor's note: We thank Tae Hong Park, a former student and friend of Jon Appleton's and Editorial Consultant for Computer Music Journal, for writing this obituary.]Jon H. Appleton was a composer, pianist, educator, inventor, and thinker who actively engaged in a musical multiverse of styles spanning avant garde, experimental, folk, popular, computer music, and electroacoustic music. Appleton was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1939 and began to explore music composition with the encouragement of his stepfather Sasha Walden, a double bass player for the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra. He attended Reed College from 1957 to 1961, primarily composing for fellow student musicians, and continued his graduate studies at the University of Oregon, where his primary teachers were Homer Keller, Henri Lazarof, Felix Salzer, and Robert Trotter. Much of his work at Oregon dealt with serial compositional techniques until he was introduced to electronic music by Keller. This led to the creation of a closet studio at the university where he composed his first pair of electronic music etudes, namely, “Study No. 1” (1964) and “Primary Experience” (1964). With his growing interests in this genre, and at the invitation of composer Vladimir Ussachevsky, whom Appleton had met in Eugene, Oregon, he moved to New York in 1966, joining the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center as a musicology graduate student. A year later, he began his tenure at Dartmouth College in 1967, which spanned more than four decades until his retirement in 2009. Soon after joining Dartmouth in 1967, Appleton founded the Bregman Electronic Music Studio with the support of Dartmouth alumnus Gerald Bregman and Dartmouth President John G. Kemeny, who is best known for codeveloping the BASIC computer language. Two decades later, in 1989, he cofounded the Electro-Acoustic Music Master's Program with David E. Jones. Beginning in 1969, Appleton published his first recordings, entitled Syntonic Menagerie (1969) and Human Music (1970), in collaboration with trumpeter Don Cherry. While continuing with his interests in electronic music composition, he further developed ideas for a new musical instrument that he had proposed to the Rockefeller Foundation when he was a graduate student. Although the proposal was rejected, Appleton persisted in pursuing the development of this new digital musical synthesizer with software programmer Sydney Alonso and Dartmouth engineering student Cameron Jones. The Dartmouth Digital Synthesizer, as it was initially called, soon became the commercially available Synclavier in 1973. The Synclavier was used by various popular musicians including Stevie Wonder, Frank Zappa, and Michael Jackson. Jackson's “Beat It" (1982) is perhaps the best-known song that features the synthesizer—in the song's introduction, seven solo Synclavier notes appear, taken verbatim from the 1981 The Incredible Sounds of Synclavier II recording. While composing electronic music composition and exploring music technologies, Appleton also spent significant effort in promoting and collaborating with like-minded composers, which led to the creation of Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States (SEAMUS) in 1984.Appleton has been awarded many accolades, including the Guggenheim, Fulbright, National Endowment for the Arts, and American-Scandinavian Foundation fellowships, and the SEAMUS Lifetime Achievement Award. Appleton released more than 20 electronic music albums since writing his first two etudes some 58 years ago; later in life, he focused his energy in writing music for nonelectronic, traditional musical instruments, including two full-length operas for a 1,500-person children's choir. As to why he stopped composing electronic music, his answer, included in his unpublished autobiography Human Music, was threefold: “(1) I don't have the equipment or the computer expertise I once had, (2) I think I have fulfilled my personal expectations in this musical genre, and (3) in the last 20 years I have found composing instrumental music more gratifying while recognizing that is not as original nor ‘groundbreaking’ as my electroacoustic has been.”He spent his last years editing Human Music. His writings, publications, and recordings are archived in the Rauner Library and the Jones Media Library at Dartmouth College. While Jon Appleton's work will remain an important contribution to the fields of electroacoustic music, computer music, and music technology, and his legacy and humanity will also undoubtedly be long celebrated through his daughter Jennifer Appleton and son “J.J.” Appleton, friends, his colleagues, and his many students’ countless memories from the Bregman Studios in Hanover, New Hampshire, and his farmhouse in Hartford, Vermont.Alvin Lucier, an inventive and widely regarded American composer, sound artist, and professor whose creative works frequently dealt with topics of acoustic and physical phenomena and auditory perception, died 1 December 2021. Lucier was born in 1931 in Nashua, New Hampshire. He was educated in Nashua public and parochial schools, and at the Portsmouth Abbey School. He studied at Yale University with composers Howard Boatwright and Quincy Porter, at Brandeis University with Arthur Berger and Harold Shapero, and at the Tanglewood Music Festival in Massachusetts with Aaron Copland and Lukas Foss. He then spent two years in Rome on a Fulbright Scholarship, whereupon attending a concert by John Cage, David Tudor, and Merce Cunningham his musical focus turned to more experimental approaches. From 1962 to 1970 he taught at Brandeis, where he conducted the Brandeis University Chamber Chorus, which devoted much of its time to the performance of new music. In 1966, along with Robert Ashley, David Behrman, and Gordon Mumma, he cofounded the Sonic Arts Union. From 1968 to 2011 he taught at Wesleyan University, where he was John Spencer Camp Professor of Music.Lucier lectured and performed extensively in Asia, Europe, and the United States. He collaborated with the poet John Ashbury (“Theme”) and stage director Robert Wilson (Skin, Meat, Bone). His sound installation Six Resonant Points Along a Curved Wall accompanied Sol DeWitt's enormous sculpture Curved Wall in Graz, Austria, and in the Zilkha Gallery, Wesleyan University, in January 2005. In 2013 Lucier was the guest composer at the Tectonics Festival in Glasgow, Scotland, and at the Ultima Festival in Oslo, Norway, and he gave a portrait concert at the Louvre Museum in Paris, France, with cellist Charles Curtis. In 2014 Lucier was honored by a three-day festival of his works at the Stedelijk Museum, in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Lucier's extensive body of work has been performed by groups such as the International Contemporary Ensemble, Bang on a Can All-Stars, the Alter Ego Ensemble, the Callithumpian Consort, and Ensemble Pamplemousse.Reflections/Reflexionen, a collection of Lucier's scores, interviews, and writings, was published by MusikTexte in 1995. In 2012 Wesleyan University Press published Lucier's Music 109: Notes on Experimental Music, a survey of works and practitioners of experimental music and sonic art in the 20th century. In 2013 New World Records released a recording of three of Lucier's orchestra works. Lucier was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States and received an Honorary Doctorate of Arts from the University of Plymouth, England. In 2011 Wesleyan University celebrated Alvin Lucier's retirement with a three-day festival of his works. He is survived by his wife, Wendy Stokes, and their daughter, Amanda.Gottfried Michael Koenig, an influential composer, educator, and theoretical writer working in electronic and instrumental music, died 30 December 2021 at the age of 95. Koenig was born in 1926 in Magdeburg, Germany. His education spanned a number of institutions across Germany, studying church music in Braunschweig; composition, piano, analysis, and acoustics in Detmold; music representation techniques in Cologne; and computer technique in Bonn. He attended the Darmstadt music summer schools for several years, initially as a student and later as a lecturer. From 1954 to 1964 Koenig worked in the electronic music studio of West German Radio in Cologne, assisting other composers—among them Karlheinz Stockhausen, Mauricio Kagel, Franco Evangelisti, György Ligeti, and Herbert Brün—and producing his own electronic compositions (“Klangfiguren,” “Essay,” “Terminus 1”). During this period he also wrote instrumental music for piano, string quartet, and woodwind quintet. From 1958 on he was an assistant in the radio drama department at the Cologne Academy of Music, where he also taught electronic music, composition, and analysis starting in 1962.In 1964 Koenig moved to the Netherlands, where until 1986 he was director and later chairman of the Institute of Sonology at Utrecht University. During this period the Institute expanded its global reputation, particularly through its annual sonology course. Koenig lectured extensively in the Netherlands and other countries. He also developed his computer programs Project 1, Project 2, and SSP, designed to formalize the composition of musical structure and variation. He continued to produce electronic works, including “Terminus 2” and the Funktionen series. These were followed by the application of his computer programs to the computer-assisted composition of chamber and orchestral music. These works included “Übung” for piano, the Segmente series, “3 ASKO Pieces,” “String Quartet 1987,” “60 Blätter” for string trio, and the orchestral works Beitrag and Concerti e Corali.Since 1986, when the Institute of Sonology moved from Utrecht University to the Royal Conservatory in The Hague, Netherlands, Koenig continued to compose, produce computer graphics and develop musical expert systems. The first three volumes of his theoretical writings were published between 1991 and 1993 as Ästhetische Praxis by Pfau Verlag; an Italian selection appeared under the title Genesi e forma, published by Semar in 1995. The fourth, fifth, and sixth volumes followed in 1999, 2002, and 2007, respectively, with the last containing a thematic index. An English-language selection was published under the title Process and Form by Wolke Verlag in 2018.Koenig received an incentive award from the Federal State of North Rhine-Westphalia in 1961, the Matthijs Vermeulen Prize from the City of Amsterdam in 1987, and the Christoph and Stephan Kaske Prize in 1991. In 2002 the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Saarbrücken, Germany, awarded Koenig an honorary doctorate. In the winter semester of 2002–2003 he was Visiting Professor for Computer Music at the Technische Universität Berlin. In 2010 Koenig received the Giga-Hertz Prize of the Zentrum für Kunst und Medien in Karlsruhe. In 2016 he was elected a member of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin.The Südwestrundfunk (SWR) Experimental Studio and the Zentrum für Kunst und Medien (ZKM) awarded the 2021 Giga-Hertz Award for Electronic Music to German sound artist Christina Kubisch in recognition of her life's work. Beginning with gender-critical works and a Video-Concerts series in collaboration with Italian artist Fabrizio Plessi, Kubisch's work came to include sound installations that engaged sound, space, light, and magnetic induction. Kubisch's Electrical Walks series, beginning in 2003, enabled audience members to listen to the electromagnetic fields around them in public spaces using specially designed headphones. Her works are in permanent collections at museums such as the Museum of Contemporary Arts in San Francisco, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, and Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. She has been awarded numerous grants, residencies, and awards, and various music labels have published her recordings. She taught as Professor of Sculpture and Audiovisual Art at the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste Saar in Saarbrücken, Germany, from 1994–2013 and since 1997 has been a member of the Music Section of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin.Additionally, Giga-Hertz Production Awards were given to composer and installation artist Yvette Janine Jackson and artist and researcher André Damião. Honorary mentions were given to Maja S. K. Ratkje, Viola Yip, and Mendi and Keith Obadike. The awards were juried by Ludger Brümmer, Peter Weibel, Detlef Heusinger, Lydia Jeschke, George Lewis, and Kirsten Reese. They were presented during a two-day festival, held virtually, 27–28 November 2021. In addition to an award ceremony, the festival featured a keynote by Christina Kubisch and a portrait concert with works spanning her career. Two other concerts featured works by the other recognized artists as well as works developed in the SWR Experimental Studio.Web: zkm.de/en/event/2021/11/giga-hertz-award-2021The 2021 International Conference on Live Coding (ICLC) was held virtually 15–17 December 2021. The conference included panel discussions, research presentations, and concerts related to live-coding-based performance of music and visual media. The theme of the conference was “Convergent Evolutions.” Three panel discussions at ICLC each addressed issues relating to code and semantics, visuality in live coding, and social and anthropological concerns in live coding. Among the research presented at the conference was the live coding of neural networks, collaborative live coding across a distributed computer network, and social practices around live-coded dance music. A long series of live-coding performances capped each evening of the conference. The festival also featured a collection of online-mediated artistic exhibitions and an online virtual reality exhibition interrogating human and machine-learning relationships and the impact of virtual spaces. A companion event, the Hybrid Live Coding Interfaces workshop, was held online prior to ICLC on 22–23 November 2021 and included panel talks on a number of topics related to live coding including software and hardware interfaces, aesthetic and social perspectives, and performance and distribution.Web: iclc.toplap.org/2021The Digital Music Research Network Workshop 2021 took place 21 December 2021, held virtually and organized by Queen Mary University of London, UK. The workshop comprised two keynote talks, oral presentations of research papers, and poster presentations. Keynote talks were given by Sophie Scott of University College London, who discussed imaging and models of primate neuroanatomy in relation to how sound is processed in the human brain, and Gus Xia of New York University Shanghai, who covered the development of intelligent systems to help people learn and compose music. Paper topics at the workshop included symbolic music generation using the GPT-2 machine learning model, the generation of drum loops using transformer neural networks, and the use of neural networks to generate MIDI sequences with specific stylistic constraints. A Neural Audio Synthesis Hackathon companion event was held 18–19 December 2021, which aimed to encourage cross-disciplinary collaboration in the use of machine-learning techniques based on neural networks for audio synthesis, with particular interest in interfaces and instruments, novel techniques and models, synthesis control, and creative applications.Web: www.qmul.ac.uk/dmrn/dmrn16