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    Cover of Musimathics

    Musimathics

    Gareth Loy · 2011

    The second volume of a commonsense, self-contained introduction to the mathematics and physics of music, focusing on the digital and computational domain; essential reading for musicians, music engineers, and anyone interested in the intersection of art and science. Volume 2 of Musimathics continues the story of music engineering begun in Volume 1, focusing on the digital and computational domain. Loy goes deeper into the mathematics of music and sound, beginning with digital audio, sampling, and binary numbers, as well as complex numbers and how they simplify representation of musical signals. Chapters cover the Fourier transform, convolution, filtering, resonance, the wave equation, acoustical systems, sound synthesis, the short-time Fourier transform, and the wavelet transform. These subjects provide the theoretical underpinnings of today's music technology. The examples given are all practical problems in music and audio. Additional material can be found at

    Arts, Games & Media
    Open LibraryAmazon
    Stats for nerds
    14recommend
    18mentions
    15people
    2008–2022years
    94% recommend6% neutral

    Mentions per year

    20082010201220142016201820202022

    What Hacker News says

    1. RochusFeb 2022
      > Are the people good at one also good at other? do mathematicians understand musical theory better than those that have no background in math

      Music and music theory are two different things. A person who is an expert in music theory is not necessarily a good musician and vice versa. There are approaches to music theory based on mathematics (see book list below); here at the latest, your assumption is likely to be correct, but hardly in general.

      Book list:

      Mathematics and Music - Composition, Perception, and Performance

      Musimathics Volume 1 and 2

      Music and Mathematics - From Pythagoras to Fractals

      Mathematical and Computational Modeling of Tonality - Theory and Applications

      thread
    2. joemidgettMay 2021
      https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~jos https://www.dspguide.com https://www.willpirkle.com/about/books Musimathics Volumes 1 and 2
      thread
    3. khinerMay 2021
      Shameless plug but I put together some Jupyter notebooks that walk through several of the fantastic books recommended in this thread: https://github.com/khiner/notebooks

      I wanted to help myself and other folks develop better intuitions around the material, particularly focusing on short animations to develop better visual intuition along with working code examples of the material in the books.

      Books covered (with a notebook for each chapter):

      * Musimathics volumes 1 & 2 by Gareth Loy

      * Introduction to the DFT by Julius Smith

      * Introduction to Digital Filters by Julius Smith

      * Physical Audio Signal Processing by Julius Smith

      also a couple not directly about audio but helpful for the domain:

      * Coding the Matrix by Philip Klein

      * Accelerated C++ by Andrew Koenig and Barbara Moo

      Hope someone gets some value from these - have fun!

      thread
    4. randcrawApr 2021
      Fundamentals is great. And the two Musimathics books neatly complement the DSP analysis of music, by approaching music generatively, as a product of math and physics: https://www.amazon.com/Musimathics-Mathematical-Foundations-...
      thread
    5. olilarkinApr 2021
      I am also a fan of Gareth Loy's Musimathics Books, should add them to the list
      thread
    6. jim-jim-jimDec 2020
      It doesn't contain code, but "Musimathics" by Gareth Loy was way more useful to me than any vanilla theory book. I think most other musically ignorant programmers would agree.
      thread

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