Taivo Lints Blog

A book, published in 2006, about the mathematical and physical foundations of music. It covers musical representation, scales, tuning, intonation, physical basis of sound, geometrical basis of sound, psychophysical basis of sound, introduction to acoustics, vibrating systems, composition and methodology (including a glimpse of less usual approaches like using artificial neural nets).

In general, I really like this kind of book about sound and music that has a solid scientific background. Unfortunately in this specific book the background is not as solid as I was hoping. While reading it, especially the physics section, I quite often had problems like: "Er... am I not getting it or what? No, wait, it can't be like that. Damn, it must be wrong in the book!" And sure enough, there ARE errors in abundance. For a list of errors known to Gareth Loy himself, see: http://www.musimathics.com/Errata.html

The other problem was that occasionally the book was not written very clearly and / or captivatingly for me... (plus the feeling that in order to explain those concepts to somebody with a humanities background (who are clearly included in the target audience), the explanations should be significantly different). Though that was not a major problem for me: I still read through the whole book and got a lot of information out of it.

In conclusion, as much as I would have liked to, I cannot suggest this book as a very good one on this topic. There are other books available about the basis of sound and music, and I suspect some of those may have a more solid science and better explanations in them, but I haven't read any others, so I can't say for sure. Also, there's some hope that Musimathics itself will be revised in future editions.

More info at the book's homepage: http://www.musimathics.com/

and at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0262122820/