Mathematical Music offers a concise and easily accessible history of
how mathematics was used to create music. The story presented in this
short, engaging volume ranges from ratios in antiquity to random
combinations in the 17th century, 20th-century statistics, and
contemporary artificial intelligence.
This book provides a fascinating panorama of the gradual mechanization
of thought processes involved in the creation of music. How did Baroque
authors envision a composition system based on combinatorics? What was
it like to create musical algorithms at the beginning of the 20th
century, before the computer became a reality? And how does this all
explain today's use of artificial intelligence and machine learning in
music? In addition to discussing the history and the present state of
mathematical music, Braguinski also takes a look at what possibilities
the near future of music AI might hold for listeners, musicians, and the
society.
Grounded in research findings from musicology and the history of
technology, and written for the non-specialist general audience, this
book helps both student and professional readers to make sense of
today's music AI by situating it in a continuous historical context.