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Rating: 
Summary: A rare gem - the only book of its kind
Review: As a fractal music hobbyist, I have been dismayed that there are so few resources that attempt to apply knowledge of fractals to music. Many books devote time to the concepts of chaos - but most applications are aimed at drawing pretty pictures. None throw more than a passing glance at musical applications. Charles Madden is truly breaking new ground here. This is the only attempt I know of that tries to pull a lot of the fractal topics together within the realm of music (e.g., self-similarity, attractors, randomicity, fractal dimensions). The book is far from perfect. Some of it is hard to follow, so it helps to have already read and understood some of the other works on chaos & fractals. It also helps to have a good layman's knowledge of music theory. This book does not explore music based on the more complex shapes (e.g., music created using the Mandelbrot set or Julia sets). Finally, if the other reviewer is correct, some of the math is kinda sketchy... So the book is slightly flawed. (Mind you, many have also criticized Mandelbrot's works for mathematical inconsistencies. Maybe it's an honor!) BUT... This is the only book of its kind. Enough said. With a little bit of background in music & in fractals, the reader will find plenty of new ideas & fresh perspectives on old ideas. What more could you want from a book?
Rating:
Summary: A rare gem - the only book of its kind
Review: As a fractal music hobbyist, I have been dismayed that there are so few resources that attempt to apply knowledge of fractals to music. Many books devote time to the concepts of chaos - but most applications are aimed at drawing pretty pictures. None throw more than a passing glance at musical applications. Charles Madden is truly breaking new ground here. This is the only attempt I know of that tries to pull a lot of the fractal topics together within the realm of music (e.g., self-similarity, attractors, randomicity, fractal dimensions). The book is far from perfect. Some of it is hard to follow, so it helps to have already read and understood some of the other works on chaos & fractals. It also helps to have a good layman's knowledge of music theory. This book does not explore music based on the more complex shapes (e.g., music created using the Mandelbrot set or Julia sets). Finally, if the other reviewer is correct, some of the math is kinda sketchy... So the book is slightly flawed. (Mind you, many have also criticized Mandelbrot's works for mathematical inconsistencies. Maybe it's an honor!) BUT... This is the only book of its kind. Enough said. With a little bit of background in music & in fractals, the reader will find plenty of new ideas & fresh perspectives on old ideas. What more could you want from a book?
Rating: 
Summary: A disappointment
Review: I thought the title of this book looked promising, so I bought it. I confess that I'm disappointed. The idea is nice - to use the mathematics of fractals for musical analysis. But unfortunately, throughout the book, the mathematics is naive and flawed. If the level of musical analysis had compensated for this, I would have forgiven it, but it doesn't. I'll give some random examples. On page 6, he introduces the concept of a Cauchy sequence, but unfortunately he thinks that if the distance between successive terms in a sequence tends to zero then the sequence is Cauchy. Although he does not claim to be making a precise definition, this error leads him to state at the top of page 32 that the sequence of harmonics of a fundamental is a Cauchy sequence, which is clearly false. On page 175, he tries to apply Nyquist's theorem to a sum of sine waves, but apparently he has not understood that sine waves at precisely half the sampling frequency do not survive the sampling process, it is only frequencies strictly below this that survive. So he simply admits confusion that Nyquist's theorem doesn't seem to work! There is certainly an interesting area here to be investigated, and maybe the real point of the book will be to make us more aware of the possibilities.
Rating: 
Summary: Dilectant attempt
Review: I was given this book as a Christmas present. Being a mathematician (PhD in Statistics) and a professional piano player I was interested. Unfortunately the book is very sophomoric and naive. The author has a very limited understanding both of music (e.g. Schenkerian theory) and mathematics and the results are quite dreadful. Mistakes are everywhere, the simple summary statistics and "dimensionality" parameters used by the author have very limited usefulness to "analyze" a piece of music (which is, if anything, a very complex time series and should be analyzed using time series methodologies) and are applied wrongly. To give an example: the author is so naive that he "proposes" to use the mean and standard deviation of a set of pitches derived from a piece of music to characterize it. He than wonders (sigh) how he can compare the standard deviation of pieces with different means ... . People with little mathematical background are especially warned not to buy this book because of its many mistakes and misunderstanding of fundamental musical and mathematical concepts.
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