Stephen Travis Pope: Sound and Music Processing in SuperCollider (1998)

“SuperCollider is a powerful and flexible programming language for sound and image synthesis and processing. It was developed by James McCartney of Austin, Texas, and is the result of more than five years of development, including the Pyrite and Synth-omatic systems from which SuperCollider is derived. The somewhat odd name of the language is derived from its creator’s obsession with the superconducting supercollider project that was planned to be undertaken in his home state of Texas, but never funded.

The SuperCollider compiler and run-time system has been implemented on Apple Macintosh and Be computers (more ports are projected), and can execute quite complicated instruments in real time on “middle-class” Macintoshs (see the notes below on its performance). This book is a step-by-step tutorial on SuperCollider programming; it is aimed at musicians who want to use it for musical sound synthesis and processing.”

“This book is an introduction to the SC language aimed at readers who have some programming background (such as knowing another sound synthesis language or a general-purpose language like C or Smalltalk). It is not meant to substitute for the SC manual, to which I indeed refer the reader in numerous places.”

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Stephen Travis Pope: Software Models and Frameworks for Sound Composition, Synthesis, and Analysis: The Siren, CSL, and MAK Music Languages (2005/2007)

Music is an undeniably complex phenomenon, so the design of abstract representations, formal models, and description languages for music-related data can be expected to be a rich domain. Music-making consists of a variety of diverse activities, and each of these presents different requirements for developers of new abstract and concrete data formats for musician users.

The topic of this anthology is the design of formal models and languages for a set of common musical activities including (but not limited to) composition, performance and production, and semantic analysis. The background of this work is the 50-year history of computer music programming languages, which began with low-level and (by today’s standards) simplistic notations for signal synthesis routines and compositional algorithms. Over these 50 years, many generations of new ideas have been applied to programming language design, and the topics of formal modeling and explicit knowledge representation have arisen and taken an important place in computer science, and thus in computer music.

The three concrete systems presented here have been developed and refined over a period of 25 years, and address the areas of (a) music composition (Siren), (b) sound synthesis and processing (CSL), and (c) music data analysis for information retrieval (MAK). In each successive generation of refinement of these concrete languages, the underlying models and metamodels have been considered and incrementally merged, so that the current-generation (Siren 7, CSL 4 and MAK 4) share both superficial and deep models and expressive facilities. This allows the user (assumed to be a composer, performer, or musicologist) to share data and functionality across these domains, and, as will be demonstrated, to extend the models and frameworks into new areas with relative ease.

The significant contributions of this work to the literature can be found in (a) the set of design criteria and trade-offs developed for music language developers, (b) the new object-oriented design patterns for computer music systems, and (c) the trans-disciplinary design of the three specific languages for composers, performer/producers, and musicologists presented here.

Anthology of papers by Stephen Travis Pope – 1986-2005; updated 2007
451 pages

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Stan Tempelaars (ed.): Signal Processing, Speech, and Music (1996)

This text offers a comprehensive introduction to the theory of signals and systems and the way in which this theory is applied to the study of acoustic communication (both digital and analogue): the development of systems for producing, transmitting and processing speech and music signals. The book is designed to make the reader acquainted with the refined and powerful theoretical and practical tools available for this purpose. The book teaches understanding of such concepts as amplitude and phase spectrum, impulse and frequency response, amplitude and frequency modulation, as well as such methods for the analysis and synthesis of speech and musical systems like LPC and wave shaping. The use of complex numbers is avoided and a knowledge of mathematics beyond that of secondary school level is not necessary.

Publisher Swets & Zeitlinger, 1996
Volume 1 of Studies on new music research
ISBN 9026514816, 9789026514814
334 pages

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