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Microsound

Curtis Roads

4.27 · Rating details · 133 ratings · 4 reviews

Below the level of the musical note lies the realm of microsound, of sound particles lasting less than one-tenth of a second. Recent technological advances allow us to probe and manipulate these pinpoints of sound, dissolving the traditional building blocks of music--notes and their intervals--into a more fluid and supple medium. The sensations of point, pulse (series of p ...more

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Paperback, 409 pages

Published August 20th 2004 by MIT Press (first published January 1st 2002)

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The Theory and Techniques of Electronic Music by Miller Puckette

Electronic Music and Musique Concrete by F.C. Judd

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Sep 13, 2019 Brandon rated it liked it

I want to like this but I think the book needs a serious editing session. Way too much information is repeated without any acknowledgment of previous mentions, giving the impression that the chapters were written independently of each other. This interrupts the flow and makes the book a bit bloated.

Speaking of bloated, there is too much effort to link composition of microsounds with some kind of irrelevant physics-derived argument for the atomicity of sound. Whether or not the latter is true (I' I want to like this but I think the book needs a serious editing session. Way too much information is repeated without any acknowledgment of previous mentions, giving the impression that the chapters were written independently of each other. This interrupts the flow and makes the book a bit bloated.

Speaking of bloated, there is too much effort to link composition of microsounds with some kind of irrelevant physics-derived argument for the atomicity of sound. Whether or not the latter is true (I'm no expert, but based on the sources quoted in the book, I guess it is), it has no impact on how a human composer would arrange sound or how a human listener would perceive it. So all of that could be cut out with no major loss.

The history of microsound stuff is interesting. No complaints there other than that often when I was reading I didn't have a means of listening to the referenced works. The discussion of modern microsound compositions and the aesthetics of composition were interesting, even when accepting that of course it must be written with a heavy focus on the author's own works.

That leaves us with the descriptions of the techniques. I found that they sit in a weird, uncomfortable spot on the spectrum between "purely descriptive and non-technical" and "full mathematical derivations". As a result, I think they're probably too technical for the casual reader, but not detailed enough for someone interested in implementing anything but the simplest technique. I also felt that the big chapter on windowed audio analysis was a bit difficult to contextualize; only after reading about (and listening to) compositions that used phase vocoders and such in a later chapter did it become clearer.

Finally, including an appendix describing the interface of a program that the author admits in the book is likely to be obsolete at the time of publication seems a bit wasteful. It pretty much just said "Look, this lets you adjust all of the parameters that we discussed in Chapter X". I would much rather have seen some (pseudo)-code listings outlining reasonable baseline algorithms for implementing the various techniques discussed in the book.

So, in the end I can't say that I really learned much from the book. However, it has inspired me and put a few signposts in the ground. I feel I'm just going to have to reinvent many wheels to get to where I want to go. ...more

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May 25, 2020 Matteo rated it liked it

bello eh ma ridondante

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Jan 28, 2019 Michael J. Flynn rated it it was amazing

A mathematical companion to Deleuze's Cinema 2: The Time Movement Image, for music. Awesome. ...more

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Feb 27, 2012 Roberto rated it it was amazing

Shelves: computer-audio-music

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“A composition that we do not understand or like appears to expand in time as we experience it, yet vanishes almost immediately from memory.” — 0 likes

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