irrelevant for me. Of course, with «Oval Process,» all the rules for sensibly guiding the user are taken into account in the same way that these questions were solved earlier, musically, in dealing with the available software at the moment of production. But now these questions would be solved on the levels of both interface design and the user ergonomics of a temporary work environment. With «Oval Process» you can speak in great detail about every nuance, but not necessarily in the sense of discussing software innovation or professional audio software; more so in the sense of asking, What do I find unimportant in all of this? / What should not be included here? For me, this means working in the blind spot of usability studies, and relying on totally different resources – other than merely the ‹right› software. On today’s computers one finds everything needed to transport files with real time character into musical environments. In the computer, this environment implies all of the program-related or technical criteria, and every modus of execution culture, including the option to decide whether one plans to generate the material as a sound installation, a live concert, an improvisation, or as a

document that behaves like an archive. Which has terribly little do with music! This is that zone entirely free of criteria, and while certain people experience it as being an amazing explosion of creative potential, others have perhaps exploited it rather lucratively over the last years. Yet the decisive questions are these: Who listens to this? Who do I play it for? Who would give me a cent for it? And that’s more interesting than asking what it represents musically. «Oval Process» is my own personal option, which I planned to leave open, in order to see it more as a practical than historical process, and in order to build on the progress of my own work as I observe it myself. Naturally this is something also marked in advance: it’s obvious that analog metaphors made of software will emulsify, and that they repeatedly restrict or limit the user to the point where the maximum result is predetermined. In between, you have a minimum of variability, and one might be able to sort or optimize according to frequencies. Then it simply becomes a question of one’s own personal, basic outlook: whether one sees himself as an artist, engineer or beta tester. I think that for Cage it was easier then to break