The Computer Music Tutorial, second edition

Expanded, updated, and fully revised—the definitive introduction to electronic music is ready for new generations of students.

Essential and state-of-the-art, The Computer Music Tutorial, second edition is a singular text that introduces computer and electronic music, explains its motivations, and puts topics into context. Curtis Roads’s step-by-step presentation orients musicians, engineers, scientists, and anyone else new to computer and electronic music.

The new edition continues to be the definitive tutorial on all aspects of computer music, including digital audio, signal processing, musical input devices, performance software, editing systems, algorithmic composition, MIDI, and psychoacoustics, but the second edition also reflects the enormous growth of the field since the book’s original publication in 1996. New chapters cover up-to-date topics like virtual analog, pulsar synthesis, concatenative synthesis, spectrum analysis by atomic decomposition, Open Sound Control, spectrum editors, and instrument and patch editors. Exhaustively referenced and cross-referenced, the second edition adds hundreds of new figures and references to the original charts, diagrams, screen images, and photographs in order to explain basic concepts and terms.

Features

• New chapters: virtual analog, pulsar synthesis, concatenative synthesis, spectrum analysis by atomic decomposition, Open Sound Control, spectrum editors, instrument and patch editors, and an appendix on machine learning

• Two thousand references support the book’s descriptions and point readers to further study

• Mathematical notation and program code examples used only when necessary

• Twenty-five years of classroom, seminar, and workshop use inform the pace and level of the material

Curtis Roads is Professor of Media Arts and Technology, with an affiliate appointment in Music, at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His previous books include Microsound and Composing Electronic Music: A New Aesthetic.

Foreword: New Music and Science xi
John Chowning
Preface to the Second Edition xv
Acknowledgments xxi
Preface to the Original Edition xxiii
I Digital Audio 1
II Introduction to Sound Synthesis 55
III Sound Synthesis 93
IV Mixing and Signal Processing 443
V Sound Analysis 631
VI The Musician's Interface 783
VII Interconnections 1029
Appendix A: Machine Learning 1087
References 1099
Index 1233