Electronic Music Systems

[Phil Thalasso]

Hi you all.
I posted this before and somehow the post disappeared. It is a link to a book about electronic music instruments which I found very useful for getting a general understanding of electronic music.
The book is provided as a download on archive.org.
Archive.org is a member of the American Library Association. (https://archive.org/about/)
Quote: "The Internet Archive, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, the print disabled, and the general public. Our mission is to provide Universal Access to All Knowledge."
The book itself is considered to be in the public domain. It has been in print in the 1970s. The last edition was offered for 15 bucks by McGraw-Hill who discontinued its publication as a pdf. You can find used hard-copies on amazon for anything beyond 150$s, which is a lot of money for a paperback.

Quote from a review on amazon.de:

"From the basics to the most advanced techniques for sound synthesis, this is the definitive text. I do not have the faintest notion as to why this book is out of print.
Every bit of information in its 150 or so pages is as current for the understanding and programming of todays virtual and hardware synths as it was to the modular synths of the 70's when this book was written. It is an incredibly easy read considering the depth of the information presented.
As an example, in reading this book, I now understand how and why I can use a ring modulator as an audio gate. Ever wonder why you can reproduce a 20 kHz sine wave with only two samples if sampling at 40kHz as per the Nyquist criterion. The straightforward explanation of the concepts of electronic signals will help you in the understanding. I feel comfortable with additive synthesis, subtractive synthesis, what FM is, what AM is and how these techniques are applicable in generating and sculpting electronic sounds."

Maybe the initial post was deleted by accident or under the assumption that I was violating copyright. I am quite sure that this is not the case. Archive.org does offer other books via an Adobe DRM-App, just like a regular library. If the book was still under a copyright-regime, they wouldn't offer it for download.
If for other reasons links of that kind don't want to be found in the forum, please let me know and I will refrain from posting anything alike inthe future.
Here it is:
https://archive.org/details/ElectronicM ... lenStrange
Regards
Phil

[Spogg]

Hi Phil

I followed the link but there seems to be no book! I tried the torrent but it just returned an xml file, about 1KB.

Perhaps you could re-check it or tell this old fool how to retireve it.

Also, if this is sorted, would it be ok to move this to General, since it's not really off-topic?

Cheers

Spogg

[Phil Thalasso]

Hi Spogg.

What an embarassment. For yesterday's post I just searched archive.org for the link and didn't even check whether this is functional or not. I got the book from that site weeks or months ago and have no better idea why those folks might have removed the downloads other than that the file itself is quite big. I apologize for sending you all into the wild without proper directions and promise to be more careful next time.

Anyhow, here is a link to google drive that I double-checked and actually is working. Beware though, that baby is a file-bomb with over 400MB in size:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1cD5EM ... capW63DLPG

The reason I posted in the Off Topic section was a discussion we had in early 2018 about the difference between analog and digital signal processing. Dr. Strange wrote his treatment of electronic music systems in the 1970s, so it's rather vintage in terms of the actual technologies he describes.

By the way, Dr. Strange himself seems to have been quite a character, not hesitating to engage analog "musical instruments" like lawn-mowers in his performances. People who attended his lectures describe him as having had a great personality, being a creative and encouraging teacher and that shows in the book. So once again, sorry for botching this up, enjoy the read and yes, Spogg, the post could be moved to the General section with the understanding that it is a general introduction to electronic music.

Regards
Phil

[Spogg]

Thanks for sharing this Phil.

I was wondering why the pdf was so big and it's because every one of the original paper pages have been scanned and saved as an image.

Whilst it's an old book I think some newbies to synthesis may well find it useful, especially those with an engineering background.

Cheers

Spogg

[Phil Thalasso]

Hello all,

two more recent finds on the net. Both books are rather dated, but I enjoyed reading them.

THE COMPLETE SYNTHESIZER:
A Comprehensive Guide By David Crombie (1984): http://exellon.net/book/The_Complete_Synthesizer.pdf

The complete guide to synthesizers:
by Devarahi (1982): http://thesnowfields.com/manuals/devara ... ers%27.pdf

Both books introduce you to basics, nothing fancy, but they really helped in toying with my hard-ware.

Regards
Phil

[Phil Thalasso]

Hello all,

some more links to books and sites about electronic music:

A rather brief list of historical developments:
http://www.tadream.net/articles/historyofem/history.pdf

This one I haven't read yet, but it sure looks promising:
"The Theory and Technique of Electronic Music": http://msp.ucsd.edu/techniques/v0.11/book.pdf

This is a link to a website with a focus on "exploring the main themes of electronic instrument design and development previous to 1970".
http://120years.net/

And another interesting website with loads of stuff (http://monoskop.org)
including the following book:
https://monoskop.org/images/4/40/Shapir ... c_2000.pdf

Regards
Phil

[Phil Thalasso]

Hello you all,

this time it's some finds mostly on dsp theory. I wish you all a good sunday!

Regards
Phil

Readable by chapter:

http://www.dspguide.com/pdfbook.htm

Another one:

https://users.dimi.uniud.it/~antonio.da ... rocess.pdf

Signal Processing for Music Analysis:

https://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/pubs/ ... -spmus.pdf

A history of virtual analog synths:

https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... _Synthesis

Design of a Scalable Polyphony-MIDI Synthesizer for a Low Cost DSP:

http://lib.tkk.fi/Dipl/2010/urn100219.pdf

musicdsp.org source code archive:

http://www.naiant.com/SM/SM%20Forum%20A ... %20DSP.pdf

[Phil Thalasso]

Hello flowstoners,

again some links some of might find interesting.

This is a set of informative presentations on basic music technology,

which you can also directly download from:

http://www.nyu.edu/classes/bello/FMT.html

http://www.nyu.edu/classes/bello/FMT_files/1_sound.pdf

http://www.nyu.edu/classes/bello/FMT_fi ... earing.pdf

https://www.nyu.edu/classes/bello/FMT_f ... phones.pdf

http://www.nyu.edu/classes/bello/FMT_fi ... peaker.pdf

http://www.nyu.edu/classes/bello/FMT_files/5_mixers.pdf

http://www.nyu.edu/classes/bello/FMT_fi ... ection.pdf

http://www.nyu.edu/classes/bello/FMT_fi ... igital.pdf

http://www.nyu.edu/classes/bello/DCMS_f ... o-MIDI.pdf

http://www.nyu.edu/classes/bello/FMT_fi ... Icomms.pdf

https://www.nyu.edu/classes/bello/FMT_f ... I_code.pdf

http://www.nyu.edu/classes/bello/FMT_fi ... thesis.pdf



http://www.nyu.edu/classes/bello/ACA.html

Audio Content Analysis:

http://www.nyu.edu/classes/bello/ACA_fi ... uction.pdf

Sound Classification:

http://www.nyu.edu/classes/bello/ACA_fi ... cation.pdf

Chroma and tonality:

http://www.nyu.edu/classes/bello/MIR_files/tonality.pdf

Time Frequency Representation:

http://www.nyu.edu/classes/bello/MIR_files/TFR.pdf

Low-level features and timbre:

http://www.nyu.edu/classes/bello/MIR_files/timbre.pdf

http://www.nyu.edu/classes/bello/MIR_fi ... dicity.pdf


The Following is a presentation about History and Practice of Digital Sound Synthesis

http://www.aes.org/technical/heyser/dow ... -Smith.pdf


Here is a typed intro to the THEORY AND PRACTICE OF MUSICAL SOUND SYNTHESIS

http://electronotes.netfirms.com/TOPOMSS-Ch1.PDF

which I found noteworthy and if it just was for the age of this document.


And finally there is another informative paper on Music Synthesis Technologies:

Digital Audio Processing
and Applications
EE5809

http://www.ee.cityu.edu.hk/~cfchan/EE5809/chap5.pdf

and

http://www.ee.cityu.edu.hk/~cfchan/EE5809/chap6.pdf on Room Acoustics and 3D Sound Processing

Obviously there are more chapters in the book, which are just listed for completeness:

Chapter 1: Introduction to digital audio

Chapter 2: Digitization of Sound

Chapter 3: Digital Audio Processing and Data Compression

Chapter 4: Lossy Audio Coding

And more can be found under http://www.ee.cityu.edu.hk/~cfchan/EE5809/

including tutorials with answers provided.

There's other stuff to be found on the site, such as

Digital Audio Technology
EE4209

http://www.ee.cityu.edu.hk/~cfchan/EE4209/

I wish you all a great week-end.

Regards
Phil

[Spogg]

You're spoiling us Phil

Many thanks for all this!

Cheers

Spogg

[RJHollins]

Thanks Phil !