MUSIC AND CONNECTIONISM Book Announcement

[todd@galadriel.stanford.edu]

			      BOOK ANNOUNCEMENT:

			   MUSIC AND CONNECTIONISM
				  edited by
		       Peter M. Todd and D. Gareth Loy


MUSIC AND CONNECTIONISM is now available from MIT Press.  This 280-pp. book
contains a wide variety of recent research in the applications of neural
networks and other connectionist methods to the problems of musical listening
and understanding, performance, composition, and aesthetics.  It consists of a
core of articles that originally appeared in the Computer Music Journal, along
with several new articles by Kohonen, Mozer, Bharucha, and others, and new
addenda to the original articles describing the authors' most recent work.
Topics covered range from models of psychological processing of pitches,
chords, and melodies, to algorithmic composition and performance factors.  A
wide variety of connectionist models are employed as well, including
back-propagation in time, Kohonen feature maps, ART networks, and Jordan- and
Elman-style networks.  We've also included a discussion generated by the
Computer Music Journal articles on the use and place of connectionist systems
in artistic endeavors.  A more detailed description of the book is provided
below (from the jacket text), along with the complete table of contents.

We hope this book will be of use to a wide variety of readers, including
neural network researchers interested in a broad, challenging, and fun new
area of application, cognitive scientists and music psychologists looking for
robust new models of musical behavior, and artists seeking to learn more about
a potentially very useful technology.

MUSIC AND CONNECTIONISM can be found in bookstores that carry MIT Press
publications, or can be purchased directly from MIT Press by calling their
toll-free order number, 1-800-356-0343, and giving the operator this catalog
number: 1CSAT 503, and this book code: TODMH.  By phone and mail-order, the
price is $39.95; in stores, it will probably be $45 (there is some confusion
with the publisher on this point, so I wanted to give out the detailed
information for phone orders to save people some money).

Please drop me a line if you have any questions, and especially if you take up
the gauntlet and pursue research or applications in this area!

                             cheers,
                             peter todd


*****************************************************************************
			   Music and Connectionism
		  edited by Peter M. Todd and D. Gareth Loy

As one of our highest expressions of thought and creativity, music has always
been a difficult realm to capture, model, and understand.  The connectionist
paradigm, now beginning to provide insights into many realms of human
behavior, offers a new and unified viewpoint from which to investigate the
subtleties of musical experience.  \fIMusic and Connectionism\fP provides a
fresh approach to both fields, using techniques of connectionism and parallel
distributed processing to look at a wide range of topics in music research,
from pitch perception to chord fingering to composition.

The contributors, leading researchers in both music psychology and neural
networks, address the challenges and opportunities of musical applications of
network models.  The result is a current and thorough survey that advances our
understanding of musical perception, cognition, composition, and performance
and of the design and analysis of networks.

Music and Connectionism is based on a core of articles originally appearing as
two special issues of the Computer Music Journal.  These have been augmented
with addenda covering more recent research by the authors.  The book opens
with tutorial chapters introducing neural networks in a musical context and
relevant aspects of previous computer music research, making this a
self-contained text.  There are many new chapters, along with new section
introductions, summaries of related work, and a final debate on the artistic
implications of connectionist methods.

Peter M. Todd is a doctoral candidate in the PDP Research Group of the
Psychology Department at Stanford University.  Gareth Loy DMA is an
award-winning composer, member of the Board of Directors of the Computer Music
Association, lecturer in the Music Department of UC San Diego, and member of
the technical staff of Frox Inc.

Contents:

Preface and Introduction
                Peter M. Todd and D. Gareth Loy

Part 1: Background
	Machine Tongues XII: Neural Networks
		Mark Dolson	    		
	Connectionism and Musiconomy
		D. Gareth Loy	       		

Part 2: Perception and Cognition
	A Neural Net Model for Pitch Perception
		Hajime Sano and B. Keith Jenkins
	Connectionist Models for Tonal Analysis
		Don L. Scarborough, Ben O. Miller, and Jacqueline A. Jones
	The Representation of Pitch in a Neural Net Model of Chord Classification
		Bernice Laden and Douglas H. Keefe
	Pitch, Harmony, and Neural Nets:  A Psychological Perspective
		Jamshed J. Bharucha	  		 
	The Ontogenesis of Tonal Semantics:  Results of a Computer Study
		Marc Leman  				 
	Modeling the Perception of Tonal Structure with Neural Nets
		Jamshed J. Bharucha and Peter M. Todd	 
	Using Connectionist Models to Explore Complex Musical Patterns
		Robert O. Gjerdingen			 
	The Quantization of Musical Time: A Connectionist Approach
		Peter Desain and Henkjan Honing		 

Part 3: Applications
	A Connectionist Approach to Algorithmic Composition
		Peter M. Todd					
	Connectionist Music Composition Based on Melodic, Stylistic, and 
          Psychophysical Constraints
		Michael C. Mozer                                
	Creation By Refinement and the Problem of Algorithmic Music Composition
		J.P. Lewis 				        
	A Nonheuristic Automatic Composing Method
		Teuvo Kohonen, Pauli Laine, Kalev Tiits, and Kari Torkkola
	Fingering for String Instruments with the Optimum Path Paradigm
		Samir I. Sayegh				        

Part 4: Conclusions
	Letter from Otto Laske 					
	Responses to Laske by Todd and Loy			
	Further Research and Directions
	      Peter M. Todd 					

List of Author Addresses