This is a useful read about composers “collaborating” with computational techniques in their musical work. It is an output of the patterns of intuition (POINT) project, aimed at establishing “creative dialogues” (p. 2) with composers based on how their compositional styles can incorporate computational methods. Various composers are matched to various computational approaches to music making, from spectral analysis to musical instrument digital interface (MIDI)-based Markov models. The computational methods are typically drawn from current computer music research, with (for example) references to recent proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC), the leading conference in this area.

This book is divided into two parts. The first 12 chapters are reports of collaborative case studies with 12 individual composers. The final six chapters are intended to draw the work together, reflect upon the work as a whole, and consider broader issues in computers and composition. This format works quite well, as the project’s overall contributions are considered from multiple perspectives, at different levels of detail. Being a fairly weighty tome, though, more concise editing would have been good. One chapter in the last section (an analysis of a Boulez piece using computation) does not seem to contribute to the overall flow of the book. Generally, though, the content is well chosen, if somewhat lengthy.

The analysis in each chapter is generally approached in a systematic way, without sacrificing intuitive elements of the creative process of composition. There is clear collaborative (bi-directional) interplay shown between each composer and the POINT team, with honest reflections on the results from the composers. There is a clear common structure to each chapter, adding coherence to the collection of the 12 composer-specific chapters. Each chapter starts with a biographical introduction to the composer featured in that chapter, followed by the composer’s views on his or her artistic approach, personal aesthetics, his or her views on formalism and intuition, and on evaluation and self-reflection in his or her artistic processes. The composer then gives his or her expectations of the project, before we are given details of the computational interactions that took place with that composer during the POINT project. Each chapter concludes with a reflective review of his or her case study by the composer.

Typically, interactions are interdisciplinary in the true sense of the word, as computational and musical thought processes combine--and occasionally collide! Sometimes, composers are placed under unnatural constraints for the benefit of computational analysis. For example, we read how one composer, Harnik, is asked to concentrate on improvising in a format that feels strange and mechanical to her (p. 16), after we have just read Harnik’s reflections about the importance of subconscious flow during improvisation. From reading Harnik’s chapter, one might suspect that the POINT project is not necessarily intended to enhance the composers’ work, but more to use the composers to enhance music informatics work through providing training data. However, this is not the impression I have from reading the whole book. While Harnik seems particularly open to the idea of working with computers, other composers show different levels of acceptance of computational interaction. Another composer, Clemens Nachtmann, is particularly keen to stress limitations he sees in formalisms (p. 39), through the possibility of them encouraging misleading or overly convenient simplification to norms of musical material at the expense of intuition and creativity. The POINT project carefully matches Nachtmann to a computational modeling approach of rejection, where Nachtmann rejects inappropriate musical models (and leaves others available for computational manipulation). Judging from Nachtmann’s feedback, this is a productive match, although interestingly Nachtmann makes little attempt to revoke his negative views on formalisms.

For computing readers, some of the composers’ artistic statements may meander on for too long; these statements could often have been edited for length without losing the richness of explanation. If the reader can navigate this type of text, though, then there is much of interest to be discovered in this fascinating collection of case studies. Often, the composers involved “still believe that intuition resists systematic analysis by nature” (Eva Reiter, p. 61), but this book is not trying to disprove that thesis. The contribution of this book is to explore (in detail) how different composers and computers might fruitfully collaborate and enhance each other’s creative capabilities, from a range of perspectives.