THEORY AND TECHNIQUES OF ELECTRONIC MUSIC, THE

by Puckette Miller S

This is the first book to develop both the theory and the practice of synthesizing musical sounds using computers. Each chapter starts with a theoretical description of one technique or problem area and ends with a series of working examples (over 100 in all), covering a wide range of applications. A unifying approach is taken throughout; chapter two, for example, treats both sampling and wavetable synthesis as special cases of one underlying technique. Although the theory is presented quantitatively, the mathematics used goes no further than trigonometry and complex numbers. The examples and supported software -- along with a machine-readable version of the text -- are available on the web and maintained by a large online community.The Theory and Techniques of Electronic Music is valuable both as a textbook and as professional reading for electronic musicians and computer music researchers.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction, Programming, Design

348 pages, Hardcover

First published May 23, 2007

Reviews

[Greg]

This is a hard book. It assumes a very strong background in at least trig, and I feel like the author intentionally avoids calculus to avoid intimidating the reader, instead resorting to slightly-awkward ways to discuss sampling a waveform in the first couple chapters, for example.

The discussion of waveshaping/fm/phase distortion/phase modeling/etc. is unique, even just insofar as it isn't a tutorial on building your own really boring FM synthesizer along the lines of a low-end Yamaha keyboard from the 80s.

I have yet to find solutions to the problems at the end of each chapter. That's most of this book not getting 5 stars.

[Phil Freihofner]

Am thrilled to discover this book, and to discover how well it is written. It's providing significantly useful and practical information right from the start. I'm currently in the middle of chapter two and am very pleased with how clear the explanations have been. My goal is to make it at least to the chapter on digital reverberation. Up to now, articles that I've found on encoding digital reverb have been too difficult for me to digest. This book looks very much like it will provide, in an orderly fashion, all the explanation and background knowledge needed to make the topic comprehensible.

This book is a great fit for me, because I am interested in understanding the coding for various electronic music components. I already have a basic knowledge of how to program, of how sound waves are encoded digitally, and have a good grounding in musical acoustics and the math involved (i.e., trigonometry). If you need to get up to speed in any of those areas, this book might be a difficult read, as that knowledge is assumed.

Also, if you are mostly interested in composing electronic music, you might prefer a book that spends more time on how to operate a specific electronic music language or platform. This volume does do a dive deep using Pd, and from what little I've learned of other electronic music languages/platforms (e.g., Super Collider, MAX/MSP, others) much of what is learned here will be transferable. But for someone more interested in using the language/platform to explore what interesting sounds it makes, this volume might be on the dry side. There is a lot of focus on nuts-and-bolts implementation tasks, such as how to make a smooth interpolator between daisy-chained wavetables, or an volume attenuater that doesn't create clicks or other artifacts. Since I'm looking forward to learning how to encode a reverberation unit, and not so concerned with how to compositionally make use of the illusion of "space" that a reverb can provide, I am quite happy here.

My main expertise is with the computer language Java, and there's not a lot that I know of being done in electronic music using Java. So, my plan is to take the material, the Pd examples, and chapter assignments and compare them with what I've already encoded with Java, or, to code a selection of things I haven't done yet in Java. IDK if I'm going to download and use Pd. It could turn out that being able to read Pd notation will be sufficient.

I'll come back to this review as I progress through the book. Hopefully it will hold up.

I'm new to goodreads, and do not understand why there is a date below that says the book has been shelved. I'm very much still reading as of 3/30/23.

[Shawn]

Sort of currently skimming.

[Dimitri Rastoropov]

If you're just a musician/composer getting into electronic music and DSP: this will kill your brain.