An echo from closed doors

On 31 December 1999 the La Trobe University Music Department closed its doors. From the outset, La Trobe Music saw itself as providing an alternative tertiary music education to the predominant paradigms of the time by fostering creativity through composition, technology, improvisation and other types of alternative performance practices. The philosophy of teaching electroacoustic music at La Trobe was to encourage students to find their own compositional voice rather than preach a particular style of electroacoustic music. The Department's research areas were in improvisation and technology, signal processing, gestural control devices, computer-assisted composition, analysis of electroacoustic music, realtime DSP, live electronics and installations. La Trobe's excellence in electroacoustic music was recognised by its inclusion in a survey of the world's top twenty-three computer music institutions by the Japanese journal Intercommunication 6. La Trobe staff and postgraduate students contributed papers and compositions to international and national computer music conferences and La Trobe was very much a part of the international community for over twenty-five years. The challenge now is for other Victorian institutions to meet the needs of today's students and to provide the deep research foundation in electroacoustic music that informs teaching and generates new music directions in the community.