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"The Technology of Computer Music
By Maxwell V Matthews,
With collaboration of
Joan E. Miller
F. R. Moore (F. Richard Moore)
J. R. Pierce (John Robinson Pierce)
J. C. Risset (John Claude Risset)
The computer is rapidly supplementing the electronic sound studio as an effective sound source and M. V. Matthews is the pioneer and authority on the increasingly important field of generating and processing speech and music through computers.
The book is intended for people who now employ or are planning to employ the computer in sound-generation and processing: engineers and scientists concerned with speech and acoustic as well as musicians and audiologists working with sound synthesis and the production of speech or music.
The general technology of generating and processing sound is covered in the first section of the book, and although understanding of teh subject does not depend on a knowledge of mathematics, special mathematical section in the appendix will provide the interested reader with the main mathematical relationships underlying the discussion.
Chapter 1 covers some fundamentals common to all computer sound processing: the representation of sounds as numbers; the underlying process of sampling and quantizing a sound wave; the apprimations and errors which are inherent in sampling and quantizing; the operation of digita-to-analog and analog-to-digital converters; the construction of smoothing filters; the storage and manipulation of sound waves in numerical form. This chapter also provides an introductory look at computer programming for sound processing which is the central subject of teh rest of the book.
Specific tutorial material aimed at training the user in one particular sound generating program -- Music V -- is given in the second section of the book. The material assumes that the user has a working knowledge of Fortran and of the general functioning of a computer -- arithmetic, memory, input-output, and programming. Relevant reference works are cited at the end of the chapter for those who require greater knowledge of these operations.
Section Three contains a detailed description of the operation and structure of the program Music V. Because it is written in Fortran IV, Music V is easily adaptable to a wide variety of computers. This section also contains reference material for users of Music V and source material for those who desire more fundamental knowledge of a sound generating program.
An appendix discusses the relations of psychoacoustics and the composition of music by Computer.
As far as I've seen, this was the first serious book published about computer music for the academics, and the general public.
It contains general information regarding Computer Composition and sound modification. It gives the generalized theory of Sampling, Playback and modifying these sounds.
About half of the book is a manual for the MUSIC V language that Matthews and the other writers created in the mid 1960s.
MUSIC V was the precursor to "C Sound". It laid out the definitions of Instrument and Score as separate concepts.
MUSIC V was written as a library in a rather early incarnation of F0RTRAN, generally still in the Punch Card/Paper Tape era of computing.
This is a resource for the serious student of Electronic Music, Composition and Sound Processing."
