11–20 of 89 posts
Wow, 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.
Wow, 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.
It wasn't published in 2025. It was published in 2009 and the rights reverted to the author in 2025, who released it for free.
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.
I 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 “fi…
I'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.
I 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 “fi…
It's like Escher; he didn't have any clue that his intricate work would excite mathematicians and crystallographers.
Mandatory reference to GEB
Amusing 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 On page 6, part of the original text has a footnote apologizing to readers far in the future for outdated speculations, then mentions that future readers "may even be an artificial intelligence rather than a human, how wonderful!"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 un…
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.
I 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 “fi…
Sure, there have been plenty of attempts to distill music to a mathematical essence. Certainly the ancient Greeks tried this, and traditional counterpoint resembles math in a number of ways. But at the end of the day, mathematical descriptions of math and music theory more generally are more useful as descriptive tools to help give language to what people are doing musically and to understand why we perceive some things as sounding better than others.
Starting with numbers can be good in some respects, like understanding the circle of fifths or how scales are built out of intervals, how chord progressions and harmony work and how to reharmonize, all of which can be augmented with a solid conceptual understanding. But at the end of the day, your ear and creative spirit are your primary asset when it comes to creating good music. This is why computer-generated music has been so bad up until AI took over. Great for building arpeggiators or backing tracks, but good luck creating a beautiful melody in a purely numerical rule-based system.