Constructing music : Musical Explorations in Creative Coding

Constructing Music presents a new method for teaching music fundamentals that foregrounds creative coding practices and builds upon the computing skills that today’s students already possess. Featuring a set of step-by-step tutorials and lessons, the book invites readers to engage directly with the components of musical structure. Readers interact with the properties of music using editable short code “patches” developed in Max, a visual coding environment for interactive music and media that has been widely used for more than thirty years. Dozens of patches accompany the book and allow readers to play with the building blocks of sound, creating for themselves the patterns of tonal music. Designed to support computer-based learning in tonal harmony, musicianship, and music theory, the book avoids the privileged lens of Western music notation and instead explains music content through analogies with Lego bricks, referencing ideas from creative technology, engineering, and design. The chapters explain core music theory concepts in detail and support the descriptions through code simulations and visualizations, progressing through the topics with increasing complexity. The final chapter explores the questions and theories that emerge from the lessons, considering the role of music as a proto-form of AI and its impacts on emotion, wellness, and creativity. Along the way, students explore the accompanying code examples and reinforce each topic by tinkering, modifying, and creating their own versions of the material. © Oxford University Press