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Introduction to Computer Music (2009) [pdf]
- DougMerritt 6mo agoThis appears to be mercifully shorter and less intimidating than the must-have bible, "Curtis Roads. The Computer Music Tutorial. MIT Press, Cambs, MA, 1996". It says it was originally published by Wiley in 2009, and the rights reverted to the author in 2025, whereupon the author released it on the net for free.
- Slow_Hand 6mo agoIf someone wanted to start making computer music I'm not sure I'd recommend this or Curtis Roads' book as a starting point. These aren't resources for getting started. They're more like encyclopedias for learning about DSP and tech once you've established the fundamentals of music and sequencing. If a beginner wants practical knowledge for making records with electronic instruments I'd give them a DAW, teach them to record and sequence, teach them basic music theory, and then point them to something like Ableton's synthesis tutorials that will teach them about oscillators, envelopes, filters, LFOs, and basic sample manipulation. That's 80% of the necessary skills right there.
- arn3n 6mo agoI often see people frame music as mathematical manipulation or try to approach music making from a “first principles” approach, where those principles are mathematics and physics. But watching musicians talk about making music, I seldom see any discussion of the underlying math, and instead see discussions of timbres, instruments, and stylistic/historical influences; musicians who make good music seems to believe “first principles” involves historical knowledge and a well-listened ear, and nothing involving math. My question is: Is thinking about music as applied mathematics a good way to create good music? Or is it just the most easily digestible model of music for the crowd on this site?
- IndySun 6mo agotbf the essay is clearly titled 'Introduction to Computer Music', and not 'Introduction to Music'.
- xgulfie 6mo agoThinking about music mathematically is at least a good way to understand music
- nuclearnicer 6mo agoWonderful question. I suspect it's partially the culture issue you point to, but also a practical issue of composition. If we decompose sound into the basic waveforms, similar to the subject pdf on page 18, we then have parts that we can reassemble. We can take the defense-funded DSP math of the likes of a John Cooley or a John Tukey and build an engine for assembling the parts of sound. All this being said, I think that's a process of convenience and a historical path not a absolute constraint. We have some more flexible means of communicating with the machines today. And I strongly encourage someone to work on a new UI for computer music. "Jazz trio piano, upright bass, and drums. start drummer laid-back, piano blowing over the changes, then piano on top."
- gizajob 6mo agoThis is the kind of UI people should be building. https://youtu.be/3poN6FDyB28?is=QjDzlmRQCMMbP_lS https://youtu.be/3poN6FDyB28?is=QjDzlmRQCMMbP_lS What you wrote described an output, not a UI.
- nuclearnicer 6mo agoIndeed it described an output and was also a UI. I meant that describing the output could be the UI. I pictured a textbox or a whisper-style text to speech session. Basically an ai chatbot specialized for generating music. I couldn't figure out precisely what that video showed, but it was fascinating. Somehow it reminded me of the orca music programming environment. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r28Xy-1_F8I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r28Xy-1_F8I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tAAsolMG-M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tAAsolMG-M
- ablanton 6mo agoI'm so happy to see Nick Collins taking this on. If you haven't seen his book, Handmade Music, it's an excellent book for music projects. This contribution looks exceptional as well.
- calny 6mo agoI was reading up on the author and saw this interesting bit[0]: > An algorave (from an algorithm and rave) is an event where people dance to music generated from algorithms, often using live coding techniques. Alex McLean of Slub and Nick Collins coined the word "algorave" in 2011, and the first event under such a name was organised in London, England. It has since become a movement, with algoraves taking place around the world. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorave
- florilegiumson 6mo agoNicolas Collins is actually a different person: https://www.nicolascollins.com/handmade.htm https://www.nicolascollins.com/handmade.htm
- ChrisArchitect 6mo agoA similar endeavour, Introduction to Computer Music, by Prof. Jeffrey Hass https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44744578 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44744578
- p1esk 6mo agoWow, this book has been published in 2025, and it has zero mention of AI generated music. Not saying it's a bad thing - from the table of content it covers a lot of important fundamentals, but ignoring the elephant in the room is... weird.
- ChrisArchitect 6mo agoThe info page, perhaps a better url for submission instead of the large/hugged PDF https://composerprogrammer.com/introcompmusic.html https://composerprogrammer.com/introcompmusic.html
- Dusseldorf 6mo agoAmusing to see how attitudes toward AI change over time. On page 6, part of the original text has a footnote apologizing to readers far in the future for outdated speculations, then mentions that future readers "may even be an artificial intelligence rather than a human, how wonderful!" But just a bit before that in the foreword written in the present day, bars AI scrapers from reading or referencing the materials under any circumstances! Anyway, this seems fantastic and I'll definitely be spending some time diving in.
- pwython 6mo ago> then mentions that future readers "may even be an artificial intelligence rather than a human, how wonderful!" My first thought seeing this post was, I need to find more literature like this, fine-tune a model with that + Logic Pro documentation, then give it an MCP to control Logic Pro and see if it can be my music production assistant.
- fassssst 6mo agohttps://github.com/ahujasid/ableton-mcp https://github.com/ahujasid/ableton-mcp
- colkassad 6mo agoI love the world of music production. I started with Ableton Live six years or so ago and it's been a wonderful hobby. It has such a vibrant cottage industry of plugins (sampled instruments, synthesizers, effects, etc) thanks to the VST standard.
- IndySun 6mo agocolkassad I work professionally with music, including using ableton. I do create but don't sell/adverise, I'm strictly 'backstage'. I love everything about creating music, less so for reading about music (reviews, critiques, dissecting) though there are occasional exceptions. Are you putting your creativity online publicly?
- colkassad 6mo agoYes, I have a soundcloud account: https://soundcloud.com/emmets-music https://soundcloud.com/emmets-music I like to mix electronic and orchestral sounds. Some examples: https://soundcloud.com/emmets-music/the-seven-hills-of-rome https://soundcloud.com/emmets-music/the-seven-hills-of-rome https://soundcloud.com/emmets-music/dark-matter https://soundcloud.com/emmets-music/dark-matter I also like piano a lot (I only know how to play guitar badly, I just draw in the notes and work velocity until it sounds good to me): https://soundcloud.com/emmets-music/life-is-delicate-remixed https://soundcloud.com/emmets-music/life-is-delicate-remixed https://soundcloud.com/emmets-music/soledad https://soundcloud.com/emmets-music/soledad Do you put yours online? I enjoy listening to other musicians. People give soundcloud a lot of grief but I love the service and the musicians I have met there.
- IndySun 6mo agoThank you. Your music is enjoyable, I listened to a couple (twice, first track and the fast one) and skimmed (four times) through others (my listening time is packed). Each piece has a filmic quality. The most impressive part is that they are (more of less) finished, which is a feat in itself. Very good. I am very backstage, I don't wish to be known professionally, except by clients, all of which came via word of mouth - I wouldn't know how to advertise and I'd probably mess it up/give the wrong impression/attract the 'wrong' clients. I won't link here but I do use soundcloud, I would say it's just ok. Tend to go Faircamp, bandcamp, geocities. MySpace lost 12 tunes. I'll make a note of our exchange and if I change my mind I'll let you know. Some of my music is not dissimilar to yours, which is often the case, and not a bad thing - like you, it's the act of creation that brings immense pleasure. Thanks again for sharing I enjoyed listening.
- ValveFan6969 6mo ago[dead]
- adultSwim 6mo agoI enjoyed Miller Puckette's Theory and Techniques of Electronic Music, using Pd. https://msp.ucsd.edu/techniques.htm https://msp.ucsd.edu/techniques.htm
- spacechild1 6mo agoThat's a classic :) The cool thing is that all examples are written in Pd (naturally) and can be explored interactively by the reader.
- NetMageSCW 6mo agoReminds me of starting college and photocopying digitized instrument wave forms (e.g. guitar string pluck) and then feeding them to a 6502 subroutine that output the waveform to the 8-bit companding DAC in my OSI C2-4P computer from a Basic driver that would play different notes through for songs.
- chaosprint 6mo agoNote: Nick Collins (the author of this book) and Alex McLean created Algorave. The time I spent learning from the Algorave community was crucial to my later work on Glicol (https://glicol.org/ https://glicol.org/). Btw, I have a feeling that if you want to learn about computer music, you can send the PDF to LLM and ask what the chapter is about and how to represent it using csound or supercollider. My experience is that with computer music, you have to keep experimenting and listening in order to truly understand and innovate.
- fodmap 6mo agoJuan García Castillejo published 'La telegrafía rápida, el triteclado y la música eléctrica' (High-speed telegraphy, the three-keyboard system, and electric music) in 1944. https://archive.org/details/latelegrafiarapida.eltritecladoylamusicaelectrica.1944juangarciacastillejo https://archive.org/details/latelegrafiarapida.eltritecladoy...
- rmnclmnt 6mo agoLoved this book when I was a student! This is for DSP enclined audience with a focus on musical applications. Not very in-depth if you want to develop your own plugins or DAW but still very informative
- Brown01 6mo ago[dead]
- Brown01 6mo ago[dead]
- Ylpertnodi 6mo agohttps://youtu.be/0Ssi-9wS1so?is=2tc8mEWK9ndA3G-4 https://youtu.be/0Ssi-9wS1so?is=2tc8mEWK9ndA3G-4 Math rock, and microtonality.
- nuxi 6mo agoOh this is just awesome, thank you!
- teleforce 6mo agoFor what it's worth there's a new book on The Science of Music by Mark Newman who also the author of the popular book on Computational Physics [1]. [1] Mark Newman's new book: The Science of Music (2023): https://lsa.umich.edu/cscs/news-events/all-news/search-news/mark-newman-s-new-book--the-science-of-music.html https://lsa.umich.edu/cscs/news-events/all-news/search-news/...
- cush 6mo agoI like that Programming for Music and Music for Programming are both on the front page together