alt Hacker NewsThis is a weird title for the book, because there's very little musical content in the book at all. It's about sound synthesis and signal processing. It's audio engineering, which is a nice skill to have for music making, but it's not music theory.
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Experimenting with timbre and the nature of sound itself is absolutely musical. That's a big reason why people love to listen to many different kinds of electronic music in the first place (or things like heavily distorted guitars).
Music is not just about combining 12TET pitches in different ways. Everything about the experience of music is open game for creative expression.
During my university studies, I took courses in electro-accoustic music composition. Significant amounts of time dealt with synthesis and signal processing because those were critical elements in these kinds of compositions.
It's absolutely different than composition for traditional instruments in this regard because the sounds you are using to compose with are being created by the composer and much as are the notes, rhythms, and structure of the composition.
So for me, the title makes perfect sense.
this assumes the position that the pre-eminence of the even-tempered music based on european art music traditions and the associated staff notation. this is extremely limiting when considering the breadth of music that exists in the real world.
this is a theory of music, and while most pedagogy will reinforce the special position of this system, it is not THE theory of music. there are alternative systems of notation. there are harmonic systems that incorporate tones that do not exist in even tempered western scales. there are drumming traditions that are taught and passed down by idiomatic onomatopoeia.
this is especially apparent in electronic music where things like step sequencers obviate the need to know any western music notation to get an instrument to produce sound.
the western classical tradition is a pedagogically imposed straight jacket. its important to keep a more open mind about what music actually is.
The book is from basically the “experimental music” school of electronic music. The idea was/is that music will be completely transmuted by electronics and computers, leaving traditional music behind. Here “traditional music” means almost everything people actually listen to, from orchestras to GarageBand electronica to pop.
The claim may be a bit aspirational right now, but in theory “electronic music” subsumes all music. Or enlarges music so much that traditional musical ideas are special cases, not necessarily relevant.
I’m trying to pitch this properly as a very cool concept. But I no longer believe it will happen in my lifetime.
Found the classically trained musician.
Any and all formal, mathematical, informal theory about music can be called music theory. Music theory is about modeling music. Period. It does not matter if it's about harmony, rhythm, pitch, form, timbre, dynamics, or some other aspect of music. Whether it helps with understanding music, composing music, improvising music etc is a separate topic. Music theory neither has to be about practical music making skills, nor it has to be about music of a particular artistic tradition. It just needs to present some model that can be a helpful tool in some musical context. Maybe what you call "audio engineering" is a specialized skill for some musical traditions, but for musical traditions where the expressive content primarily comes from timbre and synthesizers are common instruments, it will be an essential music making skill.