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How To Use This Book
Our book is organized around numerous examples with the text serving as a connecting thread. We suggest that educators and students use the individual topics and their accompanying exercises as starting points for digressions with possible trajectories of departure being musical, technological, and philosophical. One of our intentions in providing many brief examples is to inspire students and teachers to construct their own digital instruments using any available computer music system. Since creating and constructing are the most powerful learning strategies, we encourage readers to apply what they learn by working through the short compositional/technological exercises included with each chapter. To make the text flow more easily we have avoided footnotes and citations. Consequently, each chapter ends with an extensive list of articles, recordings, software, books, and references for relevant further study.
The reader will notice four icons intermingled in the text:
Apple Icon —> Applets for interactive sound making modules and images
Whispering Person Icon —> Fun Asides
Number Icon —> Deeper Math
Pumping Iron Icon —> exercises or suggestions for further study
We encourage the reader to explore these digressive areas; the Applet code is there to be used, and the exersizes are designed to be jumping off points for compositional activity.
Although our book is likely best used in a sequential fashion, the first two chapters (acoustics and psychoacoustics, computer principles), the third chapter (the mathematics of DSP), and the last two chapters (digital sound synthesis and transformation) more or less function as three independent units, which might be used in parallel. That is, teaching acoustics and basic computer ideas might (and ought to) be taught while teaching students basic synthesis techniques, which are closely derived from computational and psychoacoustic precepts. Similarly, Chapter 3, the basics of DSP and Fourier analysis, is not necessarily a prerequisite to making computer music, or even to understanding most of the material in the later chapters. However, taught in parallel, this important mathematically oriented material will greatly enhance the student's understanding of computer music and its tools.
Some Words Concerning Software
One of the most difficult aspects of studying computer music is the speedy evolution and eventual extinction of software and hardware platforms – a familiar, yet frustrating aspect of the digital working environment. These developments are implicit for advancements in compositional tools, but difficulties crop up for keeping documentation current, especially with textbooks. The best standard texts (the aforementioned Dodge and Jerse, and Roads) have elegantly avoided this problem by focussing correctly on ideas rather than software implementation, and we have followed suit.
Although we have realized a great many of our examples in some of the most current, popular and useful software (notably Tom Erbe’s Soundhack, James McCartney’s SuperCollider, Barry Vercoe’s Csound), we have no doubt that within a few years there will be a completely new set of standard tools. We also have no doubt that many of the fundamental ideas presented here will still be applicable, as they have been for some time now. We encourage the student and teacher to find an appropriate technology for their own composing, and avoid the kind of techno-consumer partisanship that so often inhibits real artistic and intellectual growth.
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