In one way or another, I have been working on The Csound Book for over fifteen years (including over 12000 email messages between collaborators, contributors, my student assistants and myself). Without the help and support of the following people, this book would have never become a reality. So…

Thanks to my mentors Tom Piggott, Robert Perry, and Hugo Norden for showing me the way and starting me on the path. Thanks to my computer music teachers, collaborators and friends–Bruce Pennycook, Dexter Morrill, F. Richard Moore, Mark Dolson, Hal Chamberlain, and Max Mathews–each of you opened my eyes, ears, and mind a little wider. And thanks to my artistic soulmates Marek Choloniewski and Lee Ray–you have been a constant source of friendship and opened my heart a little wider.

Thanks to my Csound students at Berklee, whose enthusiasm and creativity continue to be a source of energy–their technical questions and their musical answers keep me growing and keep me going. In particular, I would like to recognize my fourteen most dedicated student assistants: David Bax, Young Jun Choi, Brian Cass, Luigi Castelli, Flavio Gaete, Nate Jenkins, Jacob Joaquin, Juno Kang, Andy Koss, Samara Krugman, Bobby Pietrusko, Sandro Rebel, Yevgen Stupka, and Chuck Van Haecke.

Yevgen, all the authors owe you a debt of gratitude for the months of dedicated work you did on the block diagrams. They add a level of consistency to the entire manuscript and conceptual clarity to the concepts presented. Flavio, thank you for the hundreds of hours you put into the initial layout and editing–especially the orchestras. Samara, thanks for straightening out the references, and for converting and reformatting the entire book and reference manual. Bobby, thanks for the final read and then for spending the last weeks of summer (two years in a row) fixing ALL the "little" things you found. Chuck, thanks for rendering and formatting the hundreds of orchestras for the CD-ROM; and Brian thanks for taking over and finishing when Chuck left to tour with a Blues band. Andy, thanks for entering the figure captions and for your recommendations and suggestions on the preliminary CD-ROM and cover designs; and David, thanks for getting the CD-ROM off to such a good start. Sandro, thanks for running all the scores. Nate, thanks for the help proofing and correcting the figure text. Juno and Luigi, thanks for all your help with the instrument anthologies; and again Bobby, thanks for debugging and fixing all the busted ones, and Juno thanks for finishing them ALL especially those by Berklee and MIT students. Young and Brian, thanks for all the help finishing the CD-ROM once Jacob left to get married. And Young, thanks for all your incredible work on the final versions of everything.

Finally Jacob, thank you for all your fantastic work on The Csound CD-ROM and The Csound FrontPage. After graduating from Berklee, the fact that you took a year off before graduate school to work solely on this project is something for which I and the entire Csound community owe you a great deal. You single-handedly transformed a huge collection of "Csound stuff" into a coherent and beautiful interactive experience–a true "on-line" extension of The Csound Book. I would not have made it without you. In fact, without the dedicated and generous contributions of all these students from the Berklee College of Music, this book and CD-ROM would have taken forever to finish and would not have been half as beautiful.

Thanks to all the authors, developers, and composers who so generously contributed their knowledge and expertise to this project. I have learned so much from each of you and am so happy and honored to help you share your discoveries and insights with the world. Thank you Dustin Barlow and Tim Mielak for Csounder and SoftSamp; Young Jun Choi for Instant Csound; Russell Pinkston, and Keith Lent for Patchwork; Dave Perry for Visual Orchestra; Michael Gogins for Silence, ActiveX Csound, and JCsound; Alexandre Burton and Jean Piché for Cecilia; John Gauther for The Amsterdam Catalog; Gabriel Maldonado for your wonderful Direct X Csound and the VMCI; Mike Berry, Dave Madole, and especially Matt Ingalls for your Macintosh PPCsound port and support; Dave Phillips for all your work on the LINUX port ; and finally Hans Mikelson for your fabulous Csound E-Zine and your incredible Instrument Anthology. Thank you to these and all the other developers whose Csound "launchers," front-ends, and utilities have made the language so much more teachable, learnable, and usable.

I would like to thank the Csound documentation team lead innitially by Jean Piché and including John ffitch, Rasmus Ekman, Tolve, Matt Ingalls, Mike Berry, Servando Valero, Gabriel Maldonado, Jacob Joaquin and especially David Boothe. David, you have worked to produce and, more importantly, to maintain, the definitive reference document that is printable, portable, linked and beautifully indexed. Your Canonical Public Csound Reference Manual in both PDF and HTML formats has become the de facto standard.

Thanks, of course, to all the Csound opcode developers. I doubt that Barry Vercoe himself would recognize the 1999 version of Public Csound with all the cool new stuff that YOU have put in there! Most importantly, on behalf of the entire Csound community, I would like to acknowledge and thank my dear friend John ffitch for maintaining, improving and extending Csound and for so generously sharing his code, his time, and his expertise with virtually anyone who posts a question to the Csound mailing list. While people like me speculate on the many ways of improving Csound, John ffitch just does it.

Thanks to Douglas Sery of the MIT Press for his encouragement, advice and support. Several years ago he contacted me about doing a Csound book and along the way, whenever I would fumble or drop the ball, he was there to pick it up and toss it back. His faith in me and belief in this project are largely responsible for its successful completion.

Thanks to Mike Haidar for his generous support of my student assistants and for initiating and shepherding the Extended Csound Project at Analog Devices that resulted in my working closely with Scotty Vercoe, Sreenivas Inukoti, and Barry Vercoe from 1995-1997 on a DSP-based version of Csound–and loving every minute of it! Thanks also to Bill Verplank and the Interval Research Corporation for supporting my research in alternate controllers and sound design at Berklee that resulted in my working closely with you, Perry Cook, Rob Shaw, Paris Smaragdis and Max Mathews–another computer music dream team that I got to play with!

Finally, thank you Barry Vercoe . . . for Csound. As a gifted young composer, you chose to put aside your manuscript paper and pencil to develop a tool that gave voice to a world of young and aspiring composers–including me. On behalf of every musician and teacher who has discovered the science of sound and the mathematical basis of music through Csound, I thank you.