The Haskell School of Music: From Signals to Symphonies

This book is an amazing resource for any musician who wants to use an amazing tool to explore new ways of thinking about sound and composition, or anyone with some background in music who wants to learn Haskell. For any musician, exploring Haskell with this book (possibly in parallel with a more general reference) has the advantage that the tasks you will be working to achieve with Haskell and the Euterpea library are likely to be very engaging for you. This book is unique among programming books I've read in that it reads more like a book on music theory, or a general academic work, than a programming book. It's academic, but not at all humorless, and in fact the writing style and the classy typesetting are both charming.While most books about music and audio programming are mainly focused on designing digital instruments, The Haskell School of Music is unique in that its main focus is on composition. This is very exciting and refreshing! Programming to create real-time applications is very different from programming in higher-level functional programming languages. Using mind-bending abstractions to manipulate compositions is more creatively engaging.The Euterpea library covered in the book is really amazing too. Before I even knew it existed, I was trying to build an environment I could use for composition in a popular scripting language. I ended up just porting a bunch of functions from the Haskell standard library into my little program because it because obvious to me that Haskell is perfect for manipulating streams of data, which is ultimately what a composition is. I abandoned my own little pet project once I found out about Euterpea, since it's exactly what I would've wanted to build! And having spent just a little time trying to come up with such a thing myself I can tell you that the authors have put tremendous care into designing a truly flexible, extensible, usable library for working creatively with midi and audio. To me this book sits right alongside really great creative audio programming works like Any Farnell's famous Designing Sound, but again this is the only book I know of that focuses mainly on composition, and I've found Euterpea to be a more rewarding composition environment than Pure Data, Supercollider, or anything else!Anyway, I'll update my review as I continue working through this book. For now I'll just say that if you're even thinking about getting this book, you should! It's very creatively inspiring, and, if you've been coding along with the book and taking time to experiment, then when you are introduced to difficult abstractions like functors and monads, you're likely to think, "Oh I was wishing I could do that!".

... ma non solo. Comprende uno sguardo approfondito alla composizione algoritmica e lo stile e il tono del testo rendono facile e gradevole la lettura