For the first time, an issue of Organised Sound has been published without a theme. This has been done, not due to the Editors' running out of appropriate ideas, but instead to allow us to publish a number of submitted manuscripts that would have had to be placed in a queue if we had not dedicated one issue to catching up. In fact, the notion of a themeless issue is not completely correct. Of the six articles published in this issue, one falls reasonably well within our recent theme on space (Drever) due to the author's interest in soundscape; another two (Graves/Hand/Hugill and Manning, the issue's Tutorial Article) follow up our last issue's theme concerning image. My own contribution to this issue has been included to initiate a few of the debates associated with our thematic issue 4/3 concerning ‘Breaking the Boundaries’. I am pleased that we have two Student Articles in this issue (Couprie and Drever). The submissions that have no bearing on past or future issue themes are those by Couprie (analysis of electroacoustic music) and Polfreman (music composition software).