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Computational Music Synthesis
- SeanLuke 6y agoWow, didn't expect to see my free book on HN. I'm the author.
- Darkphibre 6y agoThis is great! I've always wanted to get into computational music. I spent five years working with audio/video codecs and APIs on the Xbox 360. Had to support various DSPs and help games improve their performance (curse you, denormals!). But I never got a chance to go full synthesis. Thanks for publishing this!!
- cjhveal 6y agoThank you for making your work available for free. I appreciate the historical context you have added.
- spacechild1 6y agoHi, I'm a computer musician. I just had a quick look at the book, but this looks like a really nice resource! I'll put this on my reading list for summer.
- FreeFull 6y agoThank you for writing this book! I'm currently working on a music creation program based on modular synthesis, and I expect the filters chapter of your book will really come in handy.
- haywirez 6y agoThank you, the chapter on resampling is very helpful for me right now as I’m implementing some of these approaches.
- radiowave 6y agoHow did I not know about Edisyn? The Microwave XT will be getting an outing this evening, I think. Thanks.
- archagon 6y agoThank you for this! Look forward to digging into it when I have more time. Just curious: on your list of publications[1], music shows up only once. How does this course relate to your other work, if at all? Or is this more of a side interest for you? [1]: https://cs.gmu.edu/~sean/papers/ https://cs.gmu.edu/~sean/papers/
- SeanLuke 6y agoSide interest.
- mkesper 6y agoI'd suggest getting rid of the boxes for hyperlinks by configuring hyperref accordingly: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/823/remove-ugly-borders-around-clickable-cross-references-and-hyperlinks https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/823/remove-ugly-bord...
- SeanLuke 6y agoWill look into it.
- waprin 6y agoThanks for submitting, I'm currently working through Stanford Audio Processing for Music Applications but this books looks like a nice companion (and I tend to prefer written content to videos). I studies some signal processing stuff in college but didn't really connect it to music unfortunately so struggled. Since then I've gotten very interested in electronic music production so it's a 2020 goal to learn more about the underlying software and math techniques, so I really appreciate this resource.
- SeanLuke 6y ago> Stanford Audio Processing for Music Applications In no universe could my little offering compete with Julius Smith. He is the man.
- leifg 6y agoIn case you don't want to submit your email address, this is the direct download link: https://cs.gmu.edu/~sean/book/synthesis/Synthesis.pdf https://cs.gmu.edu/~sean/book/synthesis/Synthesis.pdf
- yesenadam 6y agoI downloaded it first "without honor", puzzled why he wanted my email. Then I tried entering my details sans email, and was rewarded with compliments to my character – it seems email is not required. It would be better for the author's information collection, and friendlier to readers, to indicate that email is not a required field – otherwise people will assume giving email is necessary, as in a zillion similar forms online. And/or explain why email is wanted.
- SeanLuke 6y agoI'm the author. In all my free books I have collected email addresses only for very rare events. How rare? In 15 years of publishing free books I've only used the books' email list once: I used a previous book's list to let people know that Edition 2 was available. If you put in fake information, my little collector is none the wiser. Or just click on the "without honor" link, which is really there so Google can grab it.
- lukevp 6y agoThe direct link is on the page under the form too, If you are “without honor” :)
- lukevp 6y agoThanks for submitting this! Sounds really great and I’m excited to read through this. The theory of FFTs, equalizers, etc is sometimes really unapproachable because of the dense mathematics, it’s much easier for me to comprehend algorithms and concepts as code.
- nitrogen 6y agoI wonder, has anyone written a formula-to-pseudocode translator? Seems like it should be possible if you have access to the formula markup language.
- codemonkey-zeta 6y agoThis format is amazing. I love watching these types of videos on YouTube, but the random video-hopping the algorithm gives me via "recommendations" never feel productive. Now when I procrastinate by watching internet videos I can point to this book and say, "See, this isn't procrastination, I'm actually working towards something". Many thanks to the author.
- gavinray 6y agoA lot of care and work seems to have went into this book, really commend the author. However, I do have to make one slight joke: > "The topics are short and light on theory." This did not prepare me for full-page greek-letter and symbol walls haha. https://i.imgur.com/2K7w1vL.png https://i.imgur.com/2K7w1vL.png
- e79 6y agoIt is technically light on theory. DSP is just a lot of applied math and it’s hard to hand wave it away if you really want to write software. A book on music production or an introduction to audio engineering would probably offer a higher level overview.
- pierrec 6y agoThis seems nice, introductory and very up-to-date. If I may offer some superficial criticism, I found the covered material was at odds with the title. The title evokes themes of algorithmic composition and experimental whole-music generation, while the book is actually about digital synthesizers and effects on a digital signal processing level. Of course I'm having a hard time coming up with anything better, but maybe in the lines of "Audio Programming for Music", "Music DSP for Programmers", "Digital Synthesizers and Effects"...
- jointpdf 6y agoOn that note, what some favorite (ideally freely available) lectures/notes/books on the subjects of algorithmic composition and generative music? Ready, go:
- jointpdf 6y ago/chirp https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Cricket-chirping-algorithm-for-multi-objective-Deuri-Sathya/1ef3bf324a5f429db3252b59a8e3c781f6db3c4c https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Cricket-chirping-algor...
- rorykoehler 6y agoMy first thought was the same. Swapping "music" for "audio" would probably work. On a side note is generative music even music? (I think it can be but) According to my undergrad music prof the answer would be no, it would be classified as "not music", same as bird song. I've since seen research that refutes her birdsong claim (she wrote extensively on it) but I'm curious what the general consensus is?
- TheOtherHobbes 6y agoThere is no general consensus. It's a work in progress. But given that a fair amount of post-war contemporary classical was written using aleatoric techniques - basically constrained randomisation - and no one had a problem thinking of it as music, and modern generative music can be far more sophisticated both culturally and structurally, I think your prof was just plain biased and wrong. See also: digital photography isn't real photography, vinyl is better than FLAC, computers will never play chess/go, etc.
- cageface 6y agoBuilding a synthesizer from scratch was the most fun I've had as a programmer: http://www.plastaq.com/scythe_vst/ http://www.plastaq.com/scythe_vst/ I'd strongly advise against trying to write music software for a living though. The market is just too competitive now and DAWs are increasingly bundling everything a user might need to make music.
- cmehdy 6y agoI hope the current giants in DAWs are doing much experimentation with VR tools, with the addition of multi-modal interfaces (like the mimu gloves and others), which could open up some marvelous ways of re-thinking music creation as a whole-body experience. The tech for VR might still be a bit limited but the potential for the intersection of it and multi-modal interfaces is, in my opinion, very interesting.
- qppo 6y agoAlmost every DAW fails to handle spatial audio rendering properly, so I doubt this is the case. Spatial computing that relies on spatial audio rendering is basically impossible to predict in current DAW offerings - you have to rely on game engine technology for the most part. The most accessible DAW that can handle spatial audio is Reaper, which doesn't even allow an odd number of channels.
- paublyrne 6y agoCould you expand on what you mean by not handling properly? I don't work with non stereo audio and mostly use Logic but I assumed something like Nuendo would have excellent multi channel support as it's targeted at audio for film.
- qppo 6y agoThe problem is deeper than multichannel support, which is poorly supported everywhere except Pro Tools. Even that is fairly deep, Nuendo relies on VST3's model of channel set configuration which is incapable of representing the kinds of multichannel configurations that are in vogue for spatial audio rendering, like you'd find in VR. But even without leaving stereo, DAWs are already really bad. Think about how a pan or balance control works, instead of representing the perceptual localization of a sound they ask you to control the gain feeding two channels, left/right. The semantics of those two channels change after rendering, which makes it difficult to convey the same intent of a mixer/producer to the audience using that interface. Compare a stereo mix on near field monitors positioned perfectly, vs reference headphones, vs a car, vs a club system... the pan/balance control you set in your DAW changes the localization of the sound depending on ultimate render target, whereas what you need for spatial audio is for the localization to be independent from those targets. The solution is object based audio, which is not perfect and a misnomer 90% of the time, but even that is because of how terribly DAWs handle spatialization. And it's not something you can really control with a plugin without hacking the mixbus configurations inside a DAW, and you can't propagate position down to other plugins.
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