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Comment by zura | Hacker News Reader

I shared same excitements as other folks here, but soon after I started reading, I discovered that it is very daunting unless you already know the music theory. This is not explicitly mentioned in the foreword. Actually, I was hoping to learn music theory with this book, along with deepening and refreshing my Haskell knowledge.

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If you want to learn more about music theory in a nerdy way you may like:

Dave Benson's "Music: a Mathematical Offering" [1] or my own "Music for Geeks and Nerds" [2]

[1] http://homepages.abdn.ac.uk/mth192/pages/html/maths-music.ht...

[2] http://musicforgeeksandnerds.com

It is demanding, you have to know/learn a lot of stuff: music composition, probability distributions, generative models (MCMC), DSP, MIDI, haskell. For haskell alone, I like Hutton's little green/yellow book, and the Stanford course notes

http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~gmh/book.html

http://www.scs.stanford.edu/11au-cs240h/

Is that book still worth checking out if you're read Learn You a Haskell or do they occupy the same sort of beginner niche? I'm almost done with that and was thinking I'd probably take a look at real world haskell next.

Hutton's and RWH are really good books, but haskell and GHC have moved a lot since they were published. Hutton uses hugs and doesn't discuss GHC extensions like OverlappingInstances and NoMonomorphismRestriction, which are pretty important, and RWH was written against 6.10, I believe.

Since you can read RWH online, you should, but you should also check out the FPcomplete.com tutorials. Also Simon Thompson's 3rd edition Haskell book is good, probably the only thing I could call a gentle intro to haskell.

also: http://shuklan.com/haskell/

__________

Finally, there's some ridiculous number of tutorials on the haskell wiki

http://www.haskell.org/tutorial/

http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Blow_your_mind

http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Category:Tutorials

I didn't read the haskell paper yet, but one talk about music and programming that I enjoyed a lot is 'functional composition' by chris ford, using clojure. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mfsnlbd-4xQ

It simply groups and layers simple waves until he can describe a full theme. In case you didn't saw it and have 30 minutes of free time.

It's a very nerdified take on music theory which is only popular with "computer music" researchers at universities. It would be a poor way to learn music theory in the way that musicians think about it.

I agree with you completely, but as someone who knows music theory the way musicians think about it, I find the "nerdified take on music history" to be a wonderfully refreshing view on the subject!

I really find this book an insight into how to transpose one model into another. It could apply to so much more that music theory, it's just that the author has a predisposition to music and therefore uses it as the illustrative example.

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