Review: The POINT of creative collaborations between composers and computers

PATTERNS OF INTUITION is a useful read about composers ‘collaborating’ with computational techniques in their musical work. It is an output of the POINT (Patterns Of INTuition) project, aimed at establishing ‘creative dialogues’ (p.2) with composers based on how their compositional styles can incorporate computational methods. A varied selection of composers are matched to an equally varied set of computational approaches to music-making, from spectral analysis to MIDI-based Markov models. The computational methods are typically drawn from current computer music research, with (for example) references to recent proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC), the leading conference in this area.