Welcome to ECHO. We continue our exploration of the ways to talk about music and its role in human experience. With film clips, sound examples, and images, we illuminate discussion about music in ways that are accessible to readers from diverse musical backgrounds.

In this issue, we also explore new geographical terrain, with considerations of music traditions in the Indian Subcontinent, Africa, and Indonesian gamelan music in Californian youth culture, and we venture also into the territories of philosophy and film theory. Contributors to this issue come from the fields of ethnomusicology, English literature, film studies, and musicology, but all share our interest in finding creative ways to make music scholarship meaningful and vital. Film clips of James Kippen’s performances of tabla make his discussion of grooves and rhythmic patterns in North Indian music traditions immediate and compelling; footage from Gina Fatone’s documentation of the San Francisco rave scene takes readers inside the dance events she examines; musical excerpts illuminate Daniel Smith and Timothy Murphy’s consideration of how the philosophies of Deleuze and Guattari have been translated into sound, and excerpts from commercial films enable the reader to witness the workings of soundtrack music as discussed by Giorgio Biancorosso.

Our work on ECHO always challenges us; as readers respond enthusiastically to our use of multimedia and hypertext, we strive to include more and to make our journal a satisfying interactive experience. We endeavor to take advantage of our position as an online journal, providing links to relevant sites on the World Wide Web so that our readers can travel to new territories in their own explorations. ECHO will pursue new and exciting directions under the editorship of Cecilia Sun beginning with our next issue, and the journal staff looks forward to the ongoing process of exploration and discovery under her leadership.

We are grateful for the hospitality of the Department of Musicology at UCLA, and thank Michael Cohen of the Center for Digital Humanities at UCLA for his support and expert help. Our project is also facilitated by generous financial support from UCLA’s Graduate Students’ Association Publications Fund.