0.3 Why was this book written?

This book was written to support computer music courses taught from a computer science perspective. In the long term, the author’s hope is that computer music may come to be viewed as a first-class citizen of computer science, alongside similarly applied domains like computer graphics.

The book was also written to fulfill a perceived gap in the existing computer music literature. It aims to:

• Teach the material in a modern and accessible programming language (Python).

• Maintain the level of technical rigor expected of computer science texts, while keeping the focus empirical and not going too deep into the theory.

• Stay grounded in technical correctness while also touching on creative practice.

This book was heavily inspired by Digital Signals Theory by [McF23]. More broadly, it stands on the shoulders of giants, drawing inspiration from other texts like [Roa96], [Dan24], [Smi07a], among others. This book is intended to complement those works, not to supersede them.