Elemente der Musikinformatik (review)

[Editor's note: Selected reviews are posted on the Web. In some cases, they are either unpublished in the Journal itself or published in an abbreviated form in the Journal. Visit www.mitpressjournals.org/loi/comj and, under "Inside the Journal" at the left, click on "CMJ's Web site." Then click on "Reviews" at the top.]

Best known for his commanding contribution to music theory, The Topos of Music (2002), Guerino Mazzola has produced a very interesting textbook on Music Informatics in collaboration with Roland Bärtschi and Stefan Göller. This textbook provides an Internet link to the music examples used, but for those of us in the United States used to crutches, it has none of the "instructor resource manuals" or "testing CD-ROMs" that commonly accompany offerings from publishers such as McGraw-Hill or Thompson. Based on the subject matter explored, a teacher contemplating using this book would want students to have access to a computer that could run the author's RUBATO software, and also have Apple's Logic sequencer and Cycling '74's Max/MSP software installed. Although Elemente describes the features of these specific programs, the FLOSS (Free/Libre/Open Source Software) equivalents Rosegarden, Pure Data, or others, could certainly be substituted. The full text of Elemente der Musikinformatik can be accessed on-line at www.encyclospace .org/Musikinformatik_1/index.html. This review provoked a very amiable electronic mail exchange with Mr. Mazzola upon which some of this review is based.

Elemente is the manifestation of a pedagogy based on Mr. Mazzola's philosophical and mathematical theory of music elucidated in Topos. This pedagogical approach has found a home at the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM); Technische Universität Berlin; Brock University, Canada; and, courtesy of the author's recently established presence there, the University of Minnesota. Elemente would not be suitable as an undergraduate introduction to Music Informatics for a semester course, unless the teacher supplemented the presentations with projects or more detailed readings keyed to the individual chapters. Music Informatics (or Musikinformatik) may be a familiar discipline in Europe, but here in the United States, it merits discussion. From my admittedly non-extensive familiarity with university offerings nationwide, I would propose that departments offering instruction in the history, theory, and performance of music most often integrate computation at the level of technology. There, computers offer no more than a kind of word-processing power for the tasks of composition or writing papers. The kind of revolution experienced in the next building over, where students are "doing science" on their laptop computers is a largely foreign experience. On the other hand, computer science departments don't seem to have responded to audio in the same way they did with graphics. There is no sonic equivalent of the Association for Computing Machinery SIGGRAPH (Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Techniques) to exert a horizontal pull across a wide swath of sub-disciplines. Music Informatics, at least as I understand it from Mr. Mazzola's work, implies something more than "computer-based musicology" or "music CS." Elemente instructs a theoretical foundation for the artistic use of sounds. This foundation proposes to be valuable not only in the humanities, but also in scientific disciplines such as music information retrieval, music perception, and others.

Elemente's chapters are grouped in two major sections: "Theory" and "Technology." Mr. Mazzola opens his consideration of theory with a chapter on the interaction of composition and technology that constructs an historical arc from the Pythagorean tetractys and Athanasius Kirchner's music machines to Iannis Xenakis's UPIC (Unité Polygogique Informatique CeMAMu) system and the performance art of Stelarc. His chapter "Musiksemiotische Grundlagen" presents the three-dimensional coordinate space of musical knowledge familiar from Topos. The dimension of Reality involves physical, psychological, and mental layers. A phenomenon located in one layer can...