see Howard and Angus, 2017), and it does not repeat the tedious account about sound, pitch, loudness, and timbre, which is as far from my view on musical signals as much as tonal theories are far from modular synthesizer composition theories. This book does not cover acoustic and psychoacoustic principles, which can be studied in specialized textbooks (e.g. For all readers, this chapter sets the notation that is used in the following chapters. Engineers and scholars with experience in the field must forgive me for the overly simplified approach. For the eager reader, the bible of digital signal processing is Digital Signal Processing (Oppenheim and Schafer, 2009).
The section regarding the frequency domain is the most tough for the rest, there is only some high school maths. One of my aims in writing the book has been to help enthusiasts get into the world of synthesizer coding, and this chapter is necessary reading. In my experience with students from non-engineering faculties, this makes some critical points better understood.
Furthermore, operations on discrete-time series are simpler to grasp, in that it helps avoid integral and differential equations, replacing these two operators with sums and differences. The math uses the discrete-time notation as much as possible, since the rest of the book will deal with discrete-time signals. Some equations will be necessary and particularly useful for undergraduate or postgraduate students who require some more detail. The chapter will do so in an intuitive way, to help readers that are passionate about synthesizers and computer music to get into digital signal processing without the effort of reading engineering textbooks. Most modules can be described mathematically, and in this chapter we are going to deal with a few basic aspects of signal processing that are required to develop modules. Modular synthesis is all about manipulating signals to craft an ephemeral but unique form of art.
CHAPTER 2 Elements of Signal Processing for Synthesis