The best motivator for me was to start building a Standard MIDI Format sequencer and test its output on MIDI files. The underlying MIDI standard is a well-under

The best motivator for me was to start building a Standard MIDI Format sequencer and test its output on MIDI files. The underlying MIDI standard is a well-understood protocol with many resources, while SMF adds some room for creative interpretation since it's meant to work across sample-based synths, FM, etc. I started with a simple square-wave beeper, added polyphony and volume envelopes, and built it up from there. By the end, the architecture I had initially built was melting down, but it was playing Soundfonts to some degree, and I could confidently claim to understand audio coding. There's a lot of room to do things incorrectly and not notice in audio, which makes it forgiving to learn: e.g. playing a sample at a different pitch can be done badly by adding or removing arbitrary samples, but resampling it with minimal distortion is actually a fairly intensive DSP problem. Or when computing a volume, the linear amplitude usually isn't the parameter you want to work with(see every UI where volume changes imperceptibly until you reach the bottom 10% of the slider), and while there are computations to convert between linear and dB values, you still have to qualify it with one of these various references and suffixes[0]. There's a lot of crossover between audio and electrical signal terminology that can make it hard to follow this material. So you can spend a lot of time doing simple things well! [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decibel#Voltage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decibel#Voltage