"I am pleased to have had my work subjected to such rigorous scrutiny and I appreciate all the thinking David Borgo has done in an area where it is almost impossible to make any single uncontested statement!"

Evan Parker, saxophonist/improvisor/composer

"Integrating a broad range of interdisciplinary considerations - from complex systems and sociological theories to cognition and consciousness - saxophonist/composer/scholar David Borgo's Sync or Swarm makes important contributions to the expanding dialogue about contemporary improvised music."

Ed Sarath, Professor of Music and Chair, Department of Jazz and Contemporary Improvisation; Director, Program in Creativity and Consciousness Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

"Getting excited while you are READING about MUSIC may be common to ethno-musicologists. But for me (a cognitive and computer scientist), music generally lives in one part of my brain while scientific/academic work lives in another. David Borgo's Sync or Swarm successfully lights up both sides of my brain!"

Richard K. Belew, Professor and Chair, Cognitive Science Department, University of California, San Diego

"Not only is this an important book for specialists working in areas of both contemporary music and contemporary science, but it also offers absorbing reading to improvising musicians, their listeners, and the growing cadre of smart, engaged folks fascinated by the human implications of 'complex' music, chaos theory, and other once-foreboding realms."

David Ake, Associate Professor of Music, University of Nevada, Reno; author of Jazz Cultures

"Borgo is familiar with a wide range of the recent literature on complexity, chaos, embodiment, etc. and he's done a creative job of bringing that into his main topic: free-jazz group improvisation."

R. Keith Sawyer, Associate Professor of Education, Washington University; author of Explaining Creativity: The Science of Human Innovation

"David Borgo's Sync or Swarm, a provocative, gutsy, and potentially revolutionary attempt to apply chaos theory, fractal plotting, sociological Actor-Network Theory, the concept of swarm intelligence, and other analytical templates to improvised music, wow!"

Christopher Delaurenti, The Stranger