If 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.

Wonderful 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."

In short: Not really.

As another commenter below has said, "mathematics might be a useful way to understand music", but it's not how compelling music is made.

Mathematics are fundamental to scales and the harmonic series, and knowing about them will help you refine certain choices, but it's not going to help you write a dramatic melody or an emotionally resonant chord progression, or play an energizing rhythm, even if there are mathematical explanations sometimes.

Good music comes from being a good listener, having a strong sense of what's possible, where it could go, and then delivering something surprising. Telling a story with your melody and supporting the arc of that gesture with harmony that accentuates or contrasts it.

Again, there's a mathematical explanation for harmony and dissonance, but players aren't thinking that granular. They're operating at a higher level of abstraction one, two, or three levels above that: They're thinking about telling a story, evoking an emotion, and exciting an audience in the moment.

Likely historically true, but not anymore.

As a software developer I see that LLMs are better at the "craft" of making software.

Software developers training are overwhelmingly analytical.

Musicians will experience the same. That the quality of Ai generated music is superior. But it will come more as a chock for the reasons you explain.

> Is thinking about music as applied mathematics a good way to create good music?

As an instruction, I think clearly not, the fact that lots of musicians aren't mathematical at all but create great music seems to prove it to me.

But it is interesting to think about musicians who do seem to think about music this way. Bach is definitely a good example where the system of counterpoint is very complex. I'm not sure if she'd describe herself in these terns, but I've always got the impression Laurie Speigel thinks about music a little like that too. Then there's stuff like Coltrane's Giant Steps, where the whole piece is based around a sort of music theory "trick".

So maybe not generally, but there's definitely some awesome music out of that kind of relationship.

I 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

> 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.