Music and Computers, Preface

Preface

This web-book is intended as a "user-friendly" introduction to music and computers for upper division secondary and college students. By organizing a presentation around interactive visual and sonic examples, we hope to provide a resource and guide for those just beginning to look at the field of computer music, as well as for more advanced computer composers who might benefit from a fresh insight. Our web-book can be used as a text for a one term or semester course, or, more in keeping with its design, as a "module" inside of a larger curriculum.

We have designed a flexible music synthesis learning environment that can accommodate a broad scope of curricular settings; including courses in contemporary music, composition, music technology, mathematics, computer science, and interdisciplinary studies. The many platform indepedent interactive examples and audio aids are designed to stimulate the creative spirit in the learner, while the multi-level approach (with plenty of optional tangents for in-depth Mathematical studies) should cover all the bases for a comprehensive study

Our personalized approach to generating most of the audio examples has been a homegrown one; we have worked to provide examples that can be easily replicated by lay-persons who may have a minimal, yet working, knowledge of a computer music language. We encourage all users of this web-book to take advantage of our sound-making modules and use them and tweak them in any way they might imagine.

Our applets are written in Phil Burk's JSyn and Java, in an attempt to again provide a platform independent environment for designing interactive computer music examples. As teachers, we use a number of computer music programs and platforms (SuperCollider, Csound, Max/MSP, Soundhack, JSyn, and others) but we were reluctant to make any one of these a condition for using this book. We of course encourage the teacher using this book to encourage her students to actually make computer music, either by programming themselves or by using higher-level software tools. This web-book is meant to be used in conjunction with that kind of activity. There is no substitute for doing it yourself!

The important and advanced texts in the field of computer music, notably Charles Dodge and Thomas Jerse's Computer Music, and Curtis Roads' Computer Music Tutorial, present comprehensive and in-depth studies of computer generated sound and related disciplines. We hope that our shorter, less technical work will lead the interested student and teacher to these essential works. We hope that our book will serve as the doorway rather than the room itself.

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