Fundamentals of Music Processing: Audio, Analysis, Algorithms, Applications

by Meinhard Müller

This textbook provides both profound technological knowledge and a comprehensive treatment of essential topics in music processing and music information retrieval. Including numerous examples, figures, and exercises, this book is suited for students, lecturers, and researchers working in audio engineering, computer science, multimedia, and musicology. The book consists of eight chapters. The first two cover foundations of music representations and the Fourier transform—concepts that are then used throughout the book. In the subsequent chapters, concrete music processing tasks serve as a starting point. Each of these chapters is organized in a similar fashion and starts with a general description of the music processing scenario at hand before integrating it into a wider context. It then discusses—in a mathematically rigorous way—important techniques and algorithms that are generally applicable to a wide range of analysis, classification, and retrieval problems. At the same time, the techniques are directly applied to a specific music processing task. By mixing theory and practice, the book’s goal is to offer detailed technological insights as well as a deep understanding of music processing applications. Each chapter ends with a section that includes links to the research literature, suggestions for further reading, a list of references, and exercises. The chapters are organized in a modular fashion, thus offering lecturers and readers many ways to choose, rearrange or supplement the material. Accordingly, selected chapters or individual sections can easily be integrated into courses on general multimedia, information science, signal processing, music informatics, or the digital humanities.

Genres: Music, Programming, Artificial Intelligence

516 pages, Hardcover

First published August 4, 2015

Reviews

[Bill Allen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an excellent book that goes into a basic level of music theory and explores the math of the music analysis in great detail. It's an impressive collection of the equations that allow one to describe music using math. The really amazing part is the collection of jupyter notebooks that accompany the book (spoiler alert: you don't need to buy the book to access the notebooks). The authors have done an amazing job putting this all together.

OTOH, I have to admit, I'm hard pressed to understand who this book is for. It is a textbook and the target audience is for graduates and high level undergrads in math, but unless they're steeped in a lot of experience with synthesizer sound design, it is hard for me to get how they will be motivated to learn the material other than the necessity to get a good grade. At the same time, a musical practitioner with a decent math background (here I'm talking about me) isn't given sufficient musical motivation to work through the math. Do I really need to understand Hilbert spaces in order to understand what's going on? Maybe I do, but it's often not clear why.