Nick Collins
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This webpage is to support my teaching text Introduction to Computer Music. It was originally released by Wiley in 2009 but the rights reverted to me in March 2025, and I've now made a free edition. Students, tutors and researchers are all free to use the text as they need.
The free version is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license. No AI company or company seeking text training data for commercial purposes is given any implicit permission to utilise this material.
Link to download: PDF
If something in you compels you to want to pay something for this book, you can always buy the album Olectrenic Scium (2025) available here, or another album from me via the same link (various are pay what you want or free too)
Extra materials
The public part of my teaching pages are worth exploring for further bibliographies and SuperCollider code examples for many aspects of the book.
Shortcuts:A course on SuperCollider
Electronic music bibliography
Computer music bibliography
Advanced computer music bibliography
Advanced computer music workshop resources (extra SuperCollider code, and beyond into Java/Processing and C audio plug-in building)
Wiley version
Link to the original Wiley publication (now an ebook, original print run finished): LINK
For instructors, Wiley maintains their own course page where you'll find teaching materials (for instance, a set of PowerPoint slides for each chapter)
Errata from the first edition (fixed in free edition)
Happy to be emailed with comments if anybody spots errors in the book. I'll attribute any fixes to you, and add a web link as thanks.The convolution equations 4.4, 4.5 and 4.6 are indexed from 0, so the count should go up to N+M-2 to make the N+M-1 output samples, not N+M-1 as written (Bret Battey)
The onset detection equations on page 107 involving the spectrum (eqns 2 and 3) should only sum up to Nyquist or below, bin N/2, not up to N-1
The onset detection tutorial by Bello et al. was published in 2005, not 2004, and should be referenced as Bello, J. P. and Daudet, L. and Abdallah, S. and Duxbury, C. and Davies, M. and Sandler, S. B. (2005) A tutorial on onset detection in music signals. IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing 13(5): 1035-1047
Omissions and ideas
Computer music is a highly dynamic field of activity. I'll list here a few of my favourite papers and links that didn't make it into the first edition (due to the publishing schedule or my own slow reactions), but which are really worth exploring. I'm also happy to hear from you if you feel there are things that really should be covered in a possible future edition (for example, more on sound design, audiovisuals and multimedia work, etc.).
Here are a few examples of great resource texts I read since the book went to press that I'm sorry to have left out:Jordi Bonada and Xavier Serra (2007). Synthesis of the Singing Voice by Performance Sampling and Spectral Models. IEEE Signal Processing Magazine March 2007.
Percival, G., Wang, Y., and Tzanetakis, G. (2007) Effective use of multimedia for computer-assisted musical instrument tutoring. In Proceedings of the International Workshop on Educational Multimedia and Multimedia Education (Augsburg, Bavaria, Germany, September 28 - 28, 2007). Emme '07. ACM, New York, NY, 67-76.
Gary Bradski and Adrian Kaehler (2008) Learning OpenCV: Computer Vision with the OpenCV Library. O'Reilly Media.
Andy Farnell (2009) Designing Sound. Aspress.
Nicolas Collins (2009) Before Apple There Was Kim - the Microcomputer, Music and Me Microcomputermusic.pdf.