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Mathematics and computation in music : second international conference, MCM 2009, New Haven, CT, USA, June 19-22, 2009. proceedings
Chew E., Childs A., Chuan C., Springer Publishing Company, Incorporated, New York, NY, 2009. 299 pp. Type: Book (978-3-642023-93-4)
Date Reviewed: Aug 25 2010

Mathematics and music have been related since the time of the ancient Greeks [1], with computational aspects stepping in only after significant progress in computer technology and the availability of digitized scores. This explains why statisticians took their time to enter the scene, as musical data had to first be extracted from audio samples by music information retrieval (MIR) techniques. The International Conference on Mathematics and Computation in Music (MCM) is the flagship conference of the Society of Mathematics and Computation in Music. The second of these conferences was held in 2009, at Yale University, in honor of the late John Cough, a well-known mathematical music theorist.

This book consists of 26 peer-reviewed papers from the conference. As the editors put it:

[MCM] aims to provide a dedicated platform for the communication and exchange of ideas amongst researchers in mathematics, informatics, music theory, composition, musicology, and related disciplines.

The first 13 papers cover topics such as Hamiltonian cycles in musical topology, speech rhythms and metric frames, temporal patterns in polyphony, sound analysis (symbolic approach), formal diatonic intervallic notation, determining feature relevance in subject responses to musical stimuli, and sequential association rules in atonal music.

The remaining 13 papers focus on topics such as the tonality estimation problem; musical experiences with block designs; the geometry of melodic, harmonic, and metrical hierarchy; expressive timing; hidden Markov model (HMM) analysis of musical structure; dynamic multimedia interaction systems; representing and estimating musical expression in melody; and three conceptions of musical distance.

Unfortunately, there is not one single paper on fractals, and there should have been a greater emphasis on the probability and statistics papers (entropy, statistical modeling, and Bayesian analysis). A minor issue: the method for citing references is not the same in all of the papers.

The topics of these papers are perennially interesting. I strongly recommend this book to scientific libraries, but only as a reference. The target readership is postgraduates and researchers in music analysis.

Reviewer:  Soubhik Chakraborty Review #: CR138330 (1106-0602)
1) Benson, D. Music: a mathematical offering. Cambridge University Press, New York, NY, 2007.
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