To compose art music in the twenty-first century is most certainly a daunting task. Faced with a huge variety of schools of thought, media and techniques, the aspiring music creator can sometimes be found drowning in a vast sea of possibilities. This collection of seven interconnected articles serves to present in a concise manner some of the newest research in the field of music creation. The chapters are structured in a thread that goes from musical perception, cognition and emotion, to issues such as the creation of computer music instruments, the attachment of these instruments to human–machine interfaces, and matters pertaining properly to musical creation: algorithmic composition, music models for composition, and the problem of writing mixed-media works. The book concludes with an introduction to the new practice of networked performance through the internet. The authors are all well respected scholars in the field: doctors, professors and active researchers working at important academic centres in Europe and the Americas.
The first article, ‘Perception, Cognition and Musical Affect’, by José Fornari, gives a summary of some of the latest research in music cognition regarding the human perception of sound, the comprehension of meaningful musical aspects through the process of cognition, and the ensuing elicitation of emotions. Here, the author summarises mainly third-party contemporary research in psychology and neuroscience, enumerating at the end several different theories for explaining and measuring music emotion. Overall, the discussions of the issues are brief, plain and only introductory. Nonetheless, the main goal of the collection of information presented in the chapter seems to be to conceive the possibility of the definition and formalisation of music descriptors which would allow the implementation of computational models of human music perception, cognition and emotion.
The second article, ‘Fundamental Sound Synthesis and Processing Techniques for Computer Instruments’, by Victor Lazzarini, explores the basic elements for the construction of instruments for synthesis and digital signal processing, using C++ programming to explain and implement a small assortment of basic and classic computer music workhorses such as oscillators and filters, all this in a clear, well-thought-out and step-by-step demonstration. Of course, the scope of this article prevents the author to elaborate further on the C++ implementations and designs, and only a few synthesis and processing items are actually sketched and assembled. Nonetheless, this article represents the beginning of an invaluable resource for researchers and sound creators that demand ever more control over the design of their sound-creating tools, leaving behind ready-made third-party software.
The third article, ‘Design and Usage of Digital Musical Instruments’, by Marcelo M. Wanderley, introduces the reader to the concept of Digital Musical Instruments, defined by the author as a ‘hardware interface that sends control signals to computational algorithms of sound synthesis by means of strategies for the mapping or correspondence of well-defined parameters’ (p. 70). In the course of the article, the author investigates strategies for the design of gestural hardware interfaces using several types of electronic sensors such as tilt and infrared sensors, switches, accelerometers, video motion detectors, conductive rubber, hall effect sensors, force sensing resistors, gyroscopes, and so on, and discusses the practical and safe use of such interfaces in real-time concert settings. For this, he parades some of the original instruments designed by him and his team at the Input Devices and Music Interaction Laboratory (IDMIL) at McGill University, Canada. Surely, the article does not aim at actually teaching how to design such hardware interfaces. Instead, it focuses on the brief discussion of the basic central issues of the process of designing, building and playing such devices, with the intention of capturing the attention, curiosity and imagination of the reader in this promising field of research and creative activity.
The fourth article, ‘Composition with Sound Models: Fundamentals and Electroacoustic Applications’, by Daniel Luís Barreiro and Damián Keller, discusses sound synthesis in the context of musical practice and the need for consistency between the compositional tasks and the techniques of sound manipulation. After brief explanations on three contemporary paradigms for music creation – acousmatic music, soundscape and eco-composition – the article gives examples of implementations of these concepts by means of detailed analyses of four original musical works.
The fifth article, ‘Algorithmic Textural Composition via Dynamical Systems’, by Jônatas Manzolli and Adolfo Maia Jr, addresses the problem of generating a musical phenomenon by means of the application of formal models, of algorithmic abstractions of that phenomenon. The authors exemplify this compositional procedure with the description of two original algorithmic models of György Ligeti's 1962 piece Symphonic Poem for One Hundred Metronomes. What I consider the most important point of the article is the statement that algorithmic composition develops in its practitioner a new kind of solfège: upon the imagination of a musical idea or concept, the composer searches for a computational algorithmic process that is able to correctly and expressively materialise that idea.
The sixth article, ‘On the Interaction between Instrumental and Electronic Sounds’, by Rodolfo Coelho de Souza, gives an introduction to the the issues concerning the composition of works for mixed media. Here, the author tries to map the boundaries that separate instrumental and electronic sounds, and investigates mainly third-party theories on the processes that govern directionality and discourse creation, discussing paradigms for the assemblage of blocks of ideas. The discussions are conducted with elegance, clarity and care, and are all very relevant to the proposed object of study. Nonetheless, sometimes the discussions do enter the field of subjectivity when the author narrows the field of possibilities based on a somewhat hasty personal opinion. Although stated in a rather generalised and embryonic manner, the concepts developed here are all very pertinent to the beginning of an interesting method of approach to the contemporary compositional practice in general and mixed-media practice specifically.
The seventh and last article, ‘Networked Musical Performance’, by Álvaro Barbosa, investigates the new possibilities for remote online performance opened by the use of the internet and discusses the issues needed to be understood and solved in order for this to be properly implemented, such as the disruptive effect of communication latency on musical synchrony. These issues are well illustrated with descriptions of several original experiments.
As a whole, the book presents in a concise form an introduction to some very important issues for music composition in the twenty-first century. Surely, the subjects chosen to be presented here do not cover the myriad of styles, schools of thought and practices of our contemporary times. Nonetheless, the book is successful in bringing out main issues that are now being developed by researchers at important computer music centres in Europe and the Americas, as the biographies of the authors attest. This book represents an important addition to the music-theoretical literature in Portuguese and should be profitable reading for students and researchers of music creation and computer music, both from the music and the computer science academic milieux.
