In some informal remarks I made at a conference in 1979, I expressed a reluctance to deal with the subject of aesthetics, which historically is a product of European philosophy and which remains a troublesome concept for contemporary music where an aesthetic term such as ‘beauty’ seems to be studiously ignored (Truax 1980). In a recent, also informal article (Truax 1999) addressed as a ‘letter to a twenty-five-year old electroacoustic composer’, I predicted that the term ‘computer music’ would probably disappear since in an age where the computer is involved in nearly all electroacoustic music production, this term, which once distinguished a type of music from that made with analogue, electronic equipment, seemed today to be impossible to define rigorously. Therefore, the concept of the ‘aesthetics of computer music’, proposed as a panel discussion topic, initially seemed to me to be doubly suspect as to its meaning.