When I picked this book to review, I had expected a book about formal theories of music: notations, definitions, functions, relations, theorems, and so on. However, when I opened it, I found professional, academic musicians’ thoughts about future music, computers, software, artificial intelligence (AI), and creativity. I did thoroughly enjoy reading about the changes that have come in the field of music and what they hope for the future. The important audience for this book includes any computer scientist who intends to work with musicians on musical software; learning the terminology and views would be useful for understanding the problems to be solved.

The authors are/were faculty and students at the University of Minnesota. The first author, Guerino Mazzola, has published widely on these topics and the book includes many topics related to his work.

The book covers many interesting topics: a survey of musical hardware and software; the need for a well-funded “big science” approach to understanding music and music theory; the ideas of real and imaginary time; a mathematical theory of gesture; historicity in music; musical quality; software-based experimental music; software analysis of musical compositions; creation of new music by transformation; new musical instruments; serialism in musical composition; AI applications in music; African music; dance performance; and many others.

One stated goal of the book is ComMuTE (a computational music theory of everything). There are examples of possible parts of this theory throughout the book: Mazzola’s inner metric analysis; MaMuTh (mathematical music theory); Boulez’s creative analysis; Mazzola’s sonata construction; Moebius type motivic construction; and Mazzola’s synthesis project.