Audio Anecdotes: Tools, Tips, and Techniques for Digital Audio

Audio Anecdotes is a book about digital sound. It discusses analyzing, processing, creating, and recording many forms of sound and music, emphasizing the opportunities presented by digital media made possible by the arrival of inexpensive and nearly ubiquitous digital computing equipment. Applications of digital audio techniques are indispensable in: - The recording industry - The film industry - Interactive gaming - Computer Human Interaction The contributors to this volume include researchers, recording engineers, and sound designers, as well as creative artists, and the articles reflect this broad spectrum of experience in dealing with: - The fundamentals: the physics, measurement and perception of sound - Signal processing: the mathematical manipulation of sound - Recording and playback of sound: including music, voice, and field recording - Synthesis: rendering sounds which never existed including the synthesis of musical instruments, voice, or noise (Foley Sound) - Signal processing applications: from compression techniques to signal detection and recognition - Computer techniques: efficiently implementing low latency high performance audio systems on digital computers - Music theory: the mathematics of both western and non-western music - Creative topics: composition and sound design - Nature, mind, and body: how sound exists in nature and affects the mind and body This book will be an invaluable tool for anybody who uses digital sound in the creation of computer generated works, musicians, game developers, sound producers in movies and other media, and more.

Ross Bencina is an internationally recognized composer, performer, and software developer who works on the leading edge of electroacoustic music practice. In collaboration a team of open source developers, Ross designed the PortAudio cross platform audio API. He is the creator of AudioMulch Albert Bregman is emeritus professor of psychology at McGill University in Montreal, Canada Phil Burk is a designer and developer of music systems Perry R. Cook is an associate professor of computer science (jointly in music) at Princeton University Derek DiFilippo conducted research on haptic interfaces while completing his M.S.C. in computer science at the University of British Columbia and recently has been developing video compression applications at a Seattle area start-up. When he is not in a technical pursuit, he can be found playing with the Seattle Guitar Circle Alexandros has been an associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University since 1995 Hesham Fouad has been involved in various aspects of audio for the past 15 years. After receiving a doctorate in computer science in 1997, he founded VRSonic, Inc. Ken Greenebaum is a software engineer and has been developing audio and video digital media applications over the past 15 years James K. Hahn has been a faculty member in the Department of Computer Science at George Washington University since 1989 Gordon Hempton currently provides location recording services, sound design, and audio fulfillment to a broad range of businesses. He also maintains one of the largest libraries of quiet natural ambiences in the world. Gordon originally financed his passion for recording by working as a bike messenger -- and purchased his recording equipment after 13,500 deliveries. In 1989, he received a grant from the Charles Lindbergh Fund to reconstruct the wilderness soundscape of Washington State as it existed in 1889 Danny Hong co-founded a start-up company in New York, Flavor Software Inc., He is currently a Ph.D. student at Columbia Christian Hresko is currently working for the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory as a member of the STX (Submarine Technology Acoustics & Electromagnetics) Group John Klepko was a member of the faculty of music at McGill. He has worked extensively as a sound engineer specializing in music production. He also continues as a musician performing live and on recordings. Klepko is currently an associate professor at Belmont University in Nashville Daniel Levitin holds the Bell Chair in the Psychology of Electronic Communication and the FCAR Strategic Professor Chair in Psychology at McGill University in Montreal Ben Luna is a software design engineer for Microsoft in the DirectX Graphics group Henrique S. Malvar is currently a senior researcher at Microsoft, where he manages the Signal Processing group Dex Manley is a nationally recognized, award-winning voice talent and commercial actor. In addition to his career as a voice talent and actor, Dex is the president of Tenacious Media Tor A. Ramstad has held various positions in the Department of Telecommunications at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, where since 1983 he has been a full professor of telecommunications Adrienne Ross' natural history essays and other creative nonfiction have appeared in Tikkun, Northern Lights, New Age Journal, Earth Light, and other publications. Her poetry has appeared in Bridges, Poets, On American Writing, and other journals. She was awarded the 1996 Seattle Arts Commission Literary Arts award and the 2001 Artist Trust Literature Fellowship. Adrienne lives in Seattle, Washington Phil Rutschman is a software engineer with a musical background including 13 years of Suzuki piano. Lately specializing in audio codec development for embedded environments, he is currently developing streaming software for high-quality audio over Bluetooth radio links. Phil lives in Seattle, Washington, and recently received a bachelor's degree in mathematics and computer science from Western Washington University David Thiel has toured the US in rock and lounge bands, trained employees to program PL/I for an insurance company, created sounds and music and spec'ed sound systems for coin-operated video and pinball games, console games, and PC games. More recently, David worked on creative interactive audio solutions for advanced user interfaces at Microsoft Research. David's company Audio4Interaction is a consulting firm Randy Thom has been nominated for eight Oscars in film sound, and received one for The Right Stuff. His credits include Apocalypse Now, Never Cry Wolf, Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, Return of The Jedi, Backdraft, Wild at Heart, Mars Attacks, Forrest Gump, Contact, The Iron Giant, Castaway, and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. He also wrote, directed, and sound designed the Dolby Digital trailer Dream Train Wieslaw Woszczyk is the founder of the graduate program in sound recording at McGill University and of the Centre of Interdisciplinary Research in Music, Media, and Technology, which he currently directs. He currently holds the James McGill Professor Research Chair in Sound Recording