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Martenot waves, the first synthesizer (electronic, but not yet digital).

Music

Return to Major concepts. See instruments, time.
- Our posts and references.  
- Some books

All the artists we know of on this specialty are listed in our Index, with direct link on their Diccan's item. On summer 2014, we list some 200 musicians.

We concentrate here on conceptual considerations and the state of the art. The historical development of the field is described, period after period, in our history of digital art.

Music is, with literature, one of the most radically digital since its origins. Indeed, sound phenomena, tend to appear with harmonics, be it
- on sound generating objects, like strings and pipes
- on animal sound perception, from rats whiskers to internal ear hair cells.

Hence
- the progressive building of scales, universally favored in human species if not in some animal kinds,
- the role of fingers (digitus) to play on instruments,
- a graphico-textual expression of scores.

"Would you dream to refuse spirituality to music, which was borne, as the machine itself, from the reduction or concrete reality to mathematical ratios" ( "Songerait-on à nier la spiritualité de la musique née, comme la machine même, de la réduction du concret à des rapports mathématiques ?") [Faure].

Facets of music digitization : basic structure (octaves, scales, scores, instrumentation, performance, distribution).

Links

- >Z-Machines (2013), by Yoichiro Kawaguchi A gang of robot musicians. With music by Tom Jenkinson's music. Our post.
- Sound Art. A review by Dominique Moulon (Jan. 2013).
- News about electronic music Etherreal. Not specially digital, but sharp analyses and not too soft critic.
- From rave parties to MP3, a dense and up-to-date book, The digital magma [Leloup, 2013]
- A synthesis about algorithmic music [Edwards].
- Al Jazar 1206. musical automata
< Evolutionary and Biologically Inspired Music, Sound, Art and Design by Penousal Machado, James McDermott, Adrian Carballal. LNCS volume 7834. Springer 2013.
- Timbre and real time (post, 2012) about the Manoury's book.
< Musique classique à l'écran et perception culturelle. by Delphine Vincent. L'Harmattan 2012
- La musique électronique, by Jean-Yves Leloup, 2011 (Leonardo/Olat document).
> Composition assistée par ordinateur (CAO) by Gerard Assayag. In Proceedings of Asti 2001 Conference. The Ircam position in 2001, with historic notes.

- JIM Journées d'informatique musicale in Saint-Etienne.
- See Ircam.
- See Pianola website on the origins of mechanical music.
- Magazine Web Numerama.
- Selecta format, site CnetFrance.
- Site of Bibliothécaires musicaux , of Cité de la musique

Computer Cantata Lejaren Hiller, 1963 (Youtube)
Les créatures Pierre Barbaud 1966 (Youtube)

Info

- Al Jazar 1206. musical automata
> Come together (2012), (Beatles Score). Interpretation of music by Hubo robots programmed by students of Drexel University.
- Music motion, Gaité Lyrique, 9/2012.
< The digital music offer, a study by Cité de la musique.
> Come together (2012), (Beatles Score). Interpretation of music by Hubo robots programmed by students of Drexel University.

ircam
Sound design course at Ircam, 2009.

- Musical games (indicated and described by Christine Webster in KR Home-Studio, June 2011) :
. Isle of tune : compose one's own score from roads on a small island.
. Conductor : composition at random on Metro lines.
. AVClashw : compose and play a sequence.
. Tone Matrix, mixes game and music.

On Apple products, from Iphone to Ipad :
. Bloom, in the Brian Eno category of generative music,
. Kling Klang Machine, based on time zones,
. Loopesque, circular loops arrangements,
. Gliss. a pocket Metasynth,
. Bubble Harp graphic generation with the finger on the pad,
. Soundrop. simplistic, but addictive says Christine Webster,
. Thicket "a superb moment of graphic and sound poetry".

A schema from the abstract part of Jean-Marie Chouvel book. Don't let you be intimated!

Main books :

< Language, Music, and Computing by Polina Eismont , Natalia Konstantinova. Seris Communications in Computer and Information Science. Springer 2015
< Music and Human-Computer Interaction. by S. Holland, K. Wilkie, P. Mulholland and A. Seago (Eds.). Springer Series on Cultural Computing. Springer 2013.
< Musiques numériques. Essai sur la vie nomade de la musique. by Joseph Ghosn. Seuil 2013. This book deals mainly with the music distribution channels and not of digital composition or instrumentation.
< Digital magma [Leloup, 2013] From rave parties to MP3, a dense and up to date book (in French, in spite of the title). Mainly the musical facet of transmedia, generally speaking.
< Evolutionary and Biologically Inspired Music, Sound, Art and Design by Penousal Machado, James McDermott, Adrian Carballal. LNCS volume 7834. Springer 2013. Technical, in this scientific (and expensive) series.
< Musique classique à l'écran et perception culturelle. by Delphine Vincent. L'Harmattan 2012. Quite general.
< L'art génératif [Berger-Lioret 2012] p. 24-25, 55-62, 163-165. Music is one of the generative arts. The book (in French), deals with historical roots as well as the present of generative music, and concludes with some (short) bases for composers.
< Mathematics and Computation in Music by Jason Yust, Jonathan Wild, John Ashley Burgoyne. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, subseries: Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence. Volume 7937. Springer 2013.
< Creativity in music. A full part of McCormack 2012.
< Ontologies de la création en musique. Des actes en musique. Edited by Chistine Esclapez. L'Harmattan 2012.
< How music works. by David Byrne. San Francisco. McSweeney's, 2012
< Exploring Music Contents by Sølvi Ystad, Mitsuko Aramaki, Richard Kronland-Martinet, Kristoffer Jensen. Springer, LNCS volume 6684, Springer (2011 c.)
> Le style de Claude Debussy, by Sylveline Bourion. Paris, Vrin 2011. Very technical, then nearly a programming manual...
< Musimathics. The Mathematical Foundations of Music. by Gareth Loy. 2 volumes. MIT Press 2011.
- A synthesis about algorithmic music [Edwards 2011], in the Communications of the ACM.
< Le style de Claude Debussy, by Sylveline Bourion. Paris, Vrin 2011. Very technical, then nearly a programming manual.
< Musique électronique. Des avant garde aux dance floors. by Guillaume Kosmicki. Ateles. 2d edition 2010. Publishers note.

< Music and probability. by David Temperley. MIT Press 2010 (pocket version).
< Designing sound. by Andy Farnell. MIT Press 2010.
< The Supercollider book, edited by Scott Wilson, David Cottle and Nick Collins. Foreword by James McCartney. MIT Press 2011.
< Composer au XXIe siècle. Pratiques, philosophies, langages et analyses. Sophie Stévance ed. Vrin 2010.
<
< Contemporary Compositional Techniques and Openmusic. by Rozalie Hirs and Bob Gilmore (eds.). Ircam and Delatour, Paris, 2009.
< Le calcul de la musique. Composition, modèles et outils. Laurent Pottier ed. Publications de l'Université de Saint-Etienne 2009. A presentation of the book. This book presents the affordances opened by the computer to music computing. It groups different scientists, musicians and musicologists, who have thought about the origin, the present state and the future of the digital applications in the musical field.
< Electronic & Experimental music, by Thomas Holmes. 1985. 3d edition 2008.
< Musiques expérimentales. Une anthologie transversale d'enregistrements. by Philippe Roberet. le Reste 2007. Rather critical.
< The rest is noise. by Alex Ross, NY 2007. With an interesting website. French translation Actes Sud 2010.
< Musica multiplex. Dialogique du simple et du complexe en musique contemporaine. by Nicolas Darbon. L'Harmattan 2007.
< Analyse musicale. Sémiologie et cognition des formes temporelles, by Jean-Marc Chouvel. L’Harmattan 2006.
< The producer as a composer. Shaping the sounds of popular music. by Virgil Moorefield MIT Press 2005.
< Informatique musicale, François Pachet and Jean-Pierre Briot eds. Hermès Lavoisier 2004.
< Le compositeur à l'ordinateur (1955-1985) by Roberto Barbanti, Enryque Lynch, Carmen Pardo and Makis Solomos. L'Harmattan 2004.
< Création musicale et technologies nouvelles. Mutation des instruments et des relations. by Marie-Noëlle Heinich. L'Harmattan 2003. AH No 135 (Biblio).
< Musique pour les yeux, by Jean-Noël von der Weid. A 5 pages article (in French) in L'autre Journal, April 1992.
< A Generative Theory of Tonal Music. by Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff. MIT Press 1983It is not a creative approach in the line of generative art, but an analysis method, a contribution to cognition theory.
< Acoustique et musique. by E. Leipp. Masson 1971. Interesting mainly about instruments and their technologies. Important bibliography.
< Traité des objets musicaux, essai interdisciplines. by Pierre Schaeffer. Seuil 1966. 
< La musique moderne, 1905/1955. by Paul Collaer. Elsevier 1955. The final page dedicated to "mechanical music", of this book.

Varia to be edited

The composer
The instruments. Prothesis. Or automatic.
The instrumentists and orchestra
The global dispositif
The sound engineering around
The distribution of music. From street singer to Youtube.