This is the most recent Music book review video from MAKENOISE. 

These are much more in depth, mostly for those interested in listening to or using any form of synth or electronic music.

0:30 - Sounds Wild And Broken: Sonic Marvels, Evolution’s Creativity, and The Crisis Of Sensory Extinction by David George Haskell

1:28 - Structure and Synthesis: The Anatomy of Practice by Mark Fell. 

"An anthology of pioneer sound artist Mark Fell's work charting his defiantly unorthodox thinking on time, structure, technology, and the relation between academic and popular electronic music."

3:09 - Of Technique: Chance Proceedures on Turntable by Maria Chavez

4:03 - Dilla Time: The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla, the Hip-Hop Producer Who Reinvented Rhythm by Dan Charnas 

shows how, as the producer behind some of the most influential rap and R&B acts of his day, Dilla created a new kind of musical time-feel.  Dilla and his drum machine reinvented the way musicians play.

5:27 - The Sound of the Machine: My Life in Kraftwerk and Beyond by Karl Bartos (a memoir of the Kraftwerk percussionist). 

“The problem started when the computer arrived in the studio,” says Bartos. “A computer has nothing to do with creativity, it’s just a tool, but we outsourced creativity to the computer. We forgot about the centre of what we were. We lost our physical feeling, no longer looking each other in the eye, only staring at the monitor. At the time, I thought innovation and progress were synonyms. I can’t be so sure anymore.”

6:26 - Assembling a Black Counter-Culture by DeForrest Brown Jr. 

a history and critical analysis of techno and adjacent electronic music such as house and electro, showing how the genre has been shaped over time.

7:35 - Switched On: Bob Moog and the Synthesizer Revolution by Albert Glinsky 

This is the very 1st video of book reviews MAKENOISE put on YT.  The reviews weren't very detailed, but still the video points out some books meant to free our mind from boundaries when thinking/listening/using sound as music. 

These 2 books really caught my attention!

Luc Ferrari: Complete Works by Brunhild Ferrari - and Treatise on Musical Objects: An Essay Across Disciplines by Pierre Schaeffer.  Both of these books are by, or about, the 2 founding members of GRM (which I had to learn about) in Paris, France! 

Some info I found helpful in understanding the importance of GRM, the origin of sound sample plugins!:

INA GRM: The Past, Present and Future of Experimental Music - great article at ableton. 

What the GRM brought to music: from musique concrète to acousmatic music - article by Marc Battier for Organized Sound (an International Journal of Music and Technology). 

This Video: It Was Called Acousmatic - hearing phenomena, cinema for the ears, Pierre Schaeffer, Luc Ferrari and Francois Bayle, "music concrete" vs. "music abstract", "sound object" and "musical object", active listening. 

Here's the rest of the Books talked about in this video... except the books on Silent Compositions (can't write about them with a straight face).

Electronic Music: Systems, Techniques, and Controls by Allen Strange. 

This book was the "bible" for many learning electronic music techniques back in the era of analog Moog and Buchla modular synthesizers — those wonderful instruments with jungles of patch cords and with physical controls for virtually every parameter.   

Notations 21 by Theresa Sauer. 

features illustrated musical scores from more than 100 international composers, all of whom are making amazing breakthroughs in the art of notation. These spectacularly beautiful and fascinatingly creative visual pieces make not only for exciting music, but for inspiring visual art as well. The scores are accompanied by written contributions from the artists that explore every facet of their creative processes, from inspiration to execution. 

An Individual Note of Music, Sound and Electronics by Daphne Oram. 

Daphne Oram was one of the central figures in the development of British experimental electronic music. Having declined a place at the Royal College of Music to become a music balancer at the BBC, she went on to become the cofounder and first director of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.

Intermediary Spaces: Éliane Radigue by Julia Eckhardt. 

Éliane Radigue (born 1932 in Paris) is considered one of the most innovative and influential contemporary composers, from her early electronic music through to her acoustic work of the last fifteen years. Influenced by musique concrète and shaped by regular sojourns in the United States, where she discovered analogue synthesisers, her work unfolds an intensity which is at once subtle and monumental.

Sun Ra: Collected Works Vol.1 - Immeasurable Equation by Sun (a unique Jazz musician). 

Sound And Light by La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela.  

Together, they have created large-scale works for light and sound of many hours' duration--full of slow-moving microtonal sounds bathed in magenta hues and shadows--that have influenced styles as diverse as the Velvet Underground and Minimalism.

Computer Music Tutorial by Curtis Roads

covers all aspects of computer music, including digital audio, synthesis techniques, signal processing, musical input devices, performance software, editing systems, algorithmic composition, MIDI, synthesizer architecture, system interconnection, and psychoacoustics.

Microsound by Curtis Roads

sound particles lasting less than one-tenth of a second. Recent technological advances allow us to probe and manipulate these pinpoints of sound, dissolving the traditional building blocks of music—notes and their intervals—into a more fluid and supple medium.

Foundations of Computer Music by Curtis Roads

Thirty-six articles written in the 1970s and 1980s cover sound synthesis techniques, synthesizer hardware and engineering, software systems for music, and perception and digital signal processing.

Composing Electronic Music: A New Aesthetic by Curtis Roads 

spatialization as an integral aspect of composition and focuses on sound transformation as a core structural strategy. In this new domain, pitch occurs as a flowing and ephemeral substance that can be bent, modulated, or dissolved into noise. Similarly, time occurs not merely as a fixed duration subdivided by ratios, but as a plastic medium that can be generated, modulated, reversed, warped, scrambled, and granulated

Free Jazz, Harmolodics, and Ornette Coleman 

musical philosophy of "Harmolodics," an improvisational system deeply inspired by the Civil Rights Movement

Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music by Christoph Cox 

Via writings by philosophers, cultural theorists, and composers, Audio Culture explores the interconnections among such forms as minimalism, indeterminacy, musique concrète, free improvisation, experimental music, avant-rock, dub reggae, Ambient music, HipHop, and Techno.

I ran across some REALLY COOL OLD BOOKS! 

...the best part? 

THIS ONE you can read online, directly from the book - for FREE (link are to Internet Archive.org)! 

"Anecdotes of great musicians; three hundred anecdotes and biographical sketches of famous composers and performers" (1896) by Willey Francis Gates!

These 2 books look interesting (if you are interested in late 19th/early 20th Century American music history).  Both are by Richard D. Wetzel, who donated a massive collection of rare books & recordings to the Ohio University Libraries - he was also a faculty member (Richard D. Wetzel Collection).  

THIS ONE can be read at the Internet Archive (for free, if you sign up - I did, you can even view old films!).  "Oh! sing no more that gentle song : the musical life and times of William Cumming Peters (1805-66)"

William C. Peters (1805-1866) - excerpts from the Library of Congress: 

William Cumming Peters was a composer, arranger, organist, and music publisher.

Peters opened the first piano and music store in Pittsburgh in the 1820s, and also worked there as a music teacher, clarinettist, organist and composer. Peters moved to Louisville in 1832 and started a music school and circulating music library. 

If interested, look for this where you order used books - "Frontier Musicians on the Connoquenessing, Wabash, and Ohio: A History of the Music and Musicians of George Rapp's Harmony Society (1805-1906)" - lengthy book review pdf here.

I found another very cool one (not free) that has Birthdays of Musicians, with quotes, some signed portraits and snippets of melodies - like ideas jotted down at dinner!  "The Music of The Poets: A Musicians Birthday Book" (1908) by Keeling.  The ones I saw on ebay ship from the UK.  I found a cheaper (smaller scale) paperback reprint at amazon.  I love old books, but trying not to buy any (I'm downsizing) - we'll see how disappointed I am.