Elements of Computer Music Review

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(More customer reviews)This book is for anyone interested in using computers to extend the boundaries of music. The reader should already be familiar with computer programming and with music as this book treats these subjects together. It is assumed that the reader is musically literate at the level of being able to read and write common practice music notation. The author says that the reader should be familiar with mathematics at the level of high school trigonometry and algebra. However, I think that the reader should also be familiar with digital signal processing, as this book does not take too much time and space to introduce the subject and much of the book relies heavily on DSP concepts and structures.
After a brief introduction, chapter 2 of the book takes the reader on a wild ride through the world of digital audio, starting with simple representation of sound via sinusoids, through ADC and DAC issues, and concluding with a discussion of both IIR and FIR digital filters with some programming examples in C. Chapter 3 builds on the ideas in chapter 2 and shows the reader how to use digital filtering concepts to build structures that simulate musical instruments. The author also introduces his own programming environment for computer music, CMusic. Chapter 4 is all about spatial hearing, direction cues, echoes and reverberation, and the mathematical modeling of all of these phenomena. Chapter 5, "Composing", talks about algorithmic composition via random numbers, Markov processes, and noise. This is probably the chapter that depends the most on the reader having musical maturity. The appendices have a nice treatment of mathematics and of CMusic.
The ideas and algorithms discussed in this book are largely timeless, and that is why I still use my copy a great deal even 16 years after it was published. However, I will knock a single star off of my rating for the fact that the author's program, CMusic, is enshrouded in secrecy. The author will tell you how to use it, what functions are in it, etc. However, even now, the source code for it is not freely available. If you are working on a Windows platform the best you can do is find a monolithic .exe program that works best under DOS and can crash under Windows. And because I don't have access to the source code, I have no idea why this happens. If Mr. Moore had been a little more "open source" in his attitude towards CMusic, it might have caught on more than it ultimately did. Don't let this problem prevent you from buying the book, though. It is one of the best written books on computer music that I have ever read and it has many good ideas in it, and I do recommend it for anyone interested in computer music.
Because Amazon does not show the detailed table of contents, I show it here:
1. Introduction
1.1 Musical Data & Processes
1.2 Musical Thought
1.3 Composing
1.4 Performing
1.5 Instruments
1.6 Rooms
1.7 Listening
1.8 The Disciplinary Context of Computer Music
1.9 Prerequisites
2 Digital Audio
2.1 Sound Representations
2.2 Sound Digitization
2.3 Spectrum Measurements
2.4 Digital Filters
2.5 Summary
3. Instruments
3.1 Representing Instruments
3.2 cmusic
3.3 Additive Synthesis
3.5 Subtractive Synthesis and Physical Models
3.6 Summary
4. Rooms
4.1 Concert Halls
4.2 Spatial Hearing
4.3 Early Echo Response
4.4 Reverberation
4.5 Sound Spatialization
4.6 Other Issues
4.7 Summary
5. Composing
5.1 Computer-mediated Composition
5.2 Music Representations
5.3 Random Numbers
5.4 Random Sieves
5.5 Markov Processes
5.6 Noise, Filters, Random Numbers, and Probability
5.7 Compositional Algorithms
Appendix A- Mathematics
Appendix B- Units of Measure
Appendix C- Tuning
Appendix D- cmusic

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This is a general introduction to the theory of computer music, giving details on sound, digital signal processing, math, and C programming. It assumes a strong knowledge of music.

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Electric Sound: The Past and Promise of Electronic Music Review

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(More customer reviews)Although there was a spate of published historical surveys of electronic music during the early-to-mid 1970's, with the exception of Peter Manning's *Electronic & Computer Music*, there have been almost no synoptic overviews of the subject since then. Now comes Joel Chadabe's *Electric Sound*. One must admit that Chadabe's book does fill a void in the historical consideration of electronic music, and, for that reason alone, I wish that I could be more enthusiastic about it. The focus of this extremely overpriced paperbound book, however, is less on the significant achievements of composers of electronic music than it is on the technological means of creating it. One is hard pressed, indeed, to find references to more than a handful of significant compositions. Such an attitude is typical of the Post-Modern mentality (and, yes, there is such a thing, I'm sorry to say), in which artists of all stripes arrogantly offer over-intellectualized concepts and elaborate compositional and performance processes as justification for whatever results they achieve, no matter how nugatory these results may be. Here, one finds an inadvertent confirmation of that most basic critique of electronic music: That it is ultimately the soundtrack to a futuristic, technocratic nightmare in which the technology itself has become more vibrant and alive than those who create and ostensibly manipulate it. If one were to go by this book, then one would be justified in believing that, with perhaps the exception of Stockhausen's works, there have been no masterpieces of electronic music whatsoever. There has, however, been a lot of interesting hardware and software created for it. Could there be a more damning indictment of any artistic field of endeavor?
I should add that this book also suffers from the usual flaws that one might expect when a contemporary artist surveys his own field: in this case, aesthetic bias and cronyism. On the other hand, *Electric Sound* does at least cover the activities of most of the putative major figures in the field from the 1970's to the mid-1990's (although, again, it does this principally in terms of what technology they happen to be using). For this reason, I give it a provisional recommendation, simply because it is the only book I know, besides Peter Manning's also somewhat flawed, but generally far better effort, that covers this period at all. The definitive history of electronic and computer music, however, remains to be written.

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With a truly global perspective, this vivid and readable narrative provides a comprehensive overview of the history of electronic music. The author draws upon his combined experience as composer, performer, researcher, entrepreneur, and teacher to provide insight into every aspect of electronic music, including the music itself, the instruments, and the business. Based on more than 150 interviews with leaders in the field, this book allows readers to understand how and why the musicians, engineers and businessmen did what they did to develop the modern synthesizer to its current state.

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