Reviews [Editor’s note: Selected reviews are posted on the Web at http://www .computermusicjournal.org (click on the Reviews tab). In some cases, they are either unpublished in the Journal itself or published in an abbreviated form in the Journal.] Publications ¨ Orjan Sandred: The Musical Fun- damentals of Computer Assisted Composition Softcover, 2017, ISBN: 978-1- 77550000-0-6, Winnipeg: Au- diospective Media, http://sandred @umanitoba.ca. Software exam- ples from the book are available at: http://sandred.com/CACBook. Reviewed by Ross Feller Gambier, Ohio, USA The Musical Fundamentals of Com- puter Assisted Composition is a slim, practical book of value to composers, especially student composers, who might wish to formalize parts of their compositional process using read- ily available computer concepts and technologies. The book is essentially organized into two large sections. In the first part resides the bulk of the text: eight miniature chapters that introduce and present various ways to use the computer to assist the composition process. The second part contains images of the patches used to generate all the examples from the first part of the book. The patch examples were written using PatchWork GL and IRCAM’s OpenMusic. Additional examples were written in Lisp. doi:10.1162/COMJ r 00462 In the Introduction, Sandred lays out a strong argument for the long- standing importance of inventing musical systems to deal with com- positional structures and using com- puters to help achieve compositional goals. He states, “the computer can give an instant feedback on how a structure fits with a musical concept, either by producing a music score or by giving aural feedback” (p. 1). He goes on to say that composers can then adapt their music to better fit their intentions because of this immediate feedback. Chapter 1 begins by mapping out a basic territory involving musical representation. Sandred demonstrates standard ways to numerically repre- sent pitch and rhythm, largely relying on the MIDI protocol for illustra- tion. The chapter ends with chrono- metric and rhythm-tree examples, sufficiently demonstrating general principles for representing durations, metric stresses, and rhythms. In the second chapter, Sandred outlines some basic operations on pitches and durations. Beginning with simple transposition, he goes on to extrapolate to multiplication and division of frequency spectra, in- harmonicity, frequency modulation, and distorted spectra, illustrating these concepts with overtone and undertone examples from G ´ erard Grisey’s composition Modulation. Sandred also illustrates the concept of applying mathematical operations to fractional rhythm with exam- ples from piano pieces by Olivier Messiaen. Chapter 3 introduces the novice composer to modular arithmetic in music through concepts such as pitch classes, intervals, attack points, and rhythmic patterns. To illustrate how one might go about using modular arithmetic for rhythm, Sandred provides a mini-tutorial for how Mario Lanza creates rhythmic patterns in his music. In a mere four pages, chapter 4 covers how to model scales or other pitch collections. The reader is shown how to go about creating chords or other pitch collections by using pointers or index number locations. An excerpt from a work by Toru Takemitsu is used to demonstrate how one might go about utilizing pointers to select pitches in an actual composition. Chapter 5 covers the use of it- erative processes in arithmetic and geometric series. In each case, the user begins with two seed values: an initial value and either the step size or a fixed ratio that determines subsequent values. Sandred provides examples of the Fibonacci series and the Golden Section, which is the go-to procedure for many composers’ efforts to create formal balance. The chapter continues with some useful, basic information about iterative processes and chaotic orbits. Several charts are provided that show how small tweaks in seed values can pro- duce nonlinear, chaotic oscillations. Finally, at the end of the chapter, Per Publications 67 Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/comj/article-pdf/42/02/67/1856603/comj_r_00462.pdf by guest on 30 April 2021