Module Home - - Reading - - Workshop - - Tutor Website - - Study Direct site
materials adapted with kind permission from those created by Nick Collins
Shortcuts:
Computer Music Programming Resources
Mapping
Audiovisuals
Audio Digital Signal Processing Essentials
Sample-level Sound Synthesis and Processing
Interactive Music Systems
Interfacing
Machine Listening
Music Information Retrieval
Modeling of music
Electronic Music Bibliography
Computer Music Bibliography
The following abbreviations in square brackets are used:
[ICM] Nick Collins. Introduction to Computer Music. Wiley, 2010.
[CMT] Curtis Roads. The Computer Music Tutorial. MIT Press, 1996.
[CS] Richard Boulanger (Ed). The Csound Book. MIT Press, 2000.
For general reading on the history and aesthetics I recommend:
[ES] Joel Chadabe. Electric Sound: The Past and Promise of Electronic Music. Prentice Hall, 1997.
Nick Collins' tutorial on SuperCollider 3
Further SuperCollider 3 resources
James McCartney. Rethinking the computer music language: SuperCollider. Computer Music Journal, 26(4): 61-8, 2002.
Some other interesting languages:
Processing
Csound
ChucK (with ChucK tweets)
Impromptu
Common Music (CM)
Pure Data (Pd)
Nyquist
and more...
General programming languages used for audio:
C family: C, C++, Objective C (Obj C less used for DSP). Low level audio code, plug-in writing
Java; lots of interesing libraries, Processing above is a packaged up 'java for artists'.
Python: web services APIs, music21, etc.
Interesting new developments in audio for web browsers, including javascript audio and flash 10. See some javascript examples including a js drum machine based on the experimental Audio Data API for Firefox
MATLAB is often used for signal processing research; there is a non-proprietary alternative in Octave
But any general programming language can be turned to audio work; for
instance, Haskell, Scheme and LISP (indeed, the latter two underlie
Impromptu and Common Music above).
Cellular automata mapping demo
Naive map of decimal expansion digits to notes from a scale
The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences: data source, also links to play the sequences
Musical algorithms: simple MIDI playback of sequences with an awkward interface
Sonification:
Bob Sturm's 50 Particles in a Three-Dimensional Harmonic Potential: An Experiment in 5 Movements and Pacific Pulse
ICAD
Interactive Sonification workshops
Gregory Kramer (ed.) (1994) Auditory Display: Sonification,
Audification, and Auditory Interfaces. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley
Publishing Company
Thomas Hermann, Andy Hunt, John G. Neuhoff (eds.) (2011) The Sonification Handbook. Berlin: Logos Publishing House (free to download)
Centre for Visual Music
Fred Collopy
Chion, M. 1994. Audio-vision. New York: Columbia University Press. Original published 1990, translated by Gorbman, C.
Cook, N. 1998. Analysing Musical Multimedia. Oxford: Oxford University Press, New York.
Spinrad, Paul. The VJ Book. Feral House, 2005
[link] Bill Alves (2005) Digital Harmony of Sound and Light Computer Music Journal 29(4): 45-54. Winter 2005.
[link] Nick
Collins and Fredrik Olofsson. klipp av: Live Algorithmic Splicing and
Audiovisual Event Capture, Computer Music Journal 30(2): pp 8-18
[link]
Lew, Michael. 2004. Live Cinema: Designing an Instrument for Cinema
Editing as a Live Performance. Proceedings of New Interfaces for Musical
Expression (NIME04).
Jaeger, Timothy. (2005) Live Cinema Unravelled (self-published) VJ Book
[link] Snider, H. Scratch Video: A Mutant Hybrid of Scratch DJ Music and Guerilla TV. Master's thesis, University of Concordia, 2000.
ICM chapter 4 (review Ch 1 if needed)
Gareth Loy. 2006. Musimathics (volume 2). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
Richard Boulanger and Victor Lazzarini (eds.) (2010) The Audio Programming Book. Cambridge MA: MIT Press
CMT
CS chapter 26 (convolution)
Monson H. Hayes. Schaum's Outline of Digital Signal Processing. McGraw-Hill, 1998.
Online book introducing filters, by Julius O. Smith
Free online signal processing book by Steven W. Smith here
Digital sound processing tutorial for the braindead!
Interpolation online explanation from Paul Bourke
CMT chapter 13, chapter 4 p144-156, Appendix: Fourier Analysis
CS chapters 27,28
Axel Roebel's lectures on sound analysis, synthesis and transformation (mathematical exposition)
Mark Dolson. The Phase Vocoder: A Tutorial
CMT chapter 8
CMT chapter 5, p163-7 (Wave Terrain Synthesis)
Iannis Xenakis. Formalized Music. Pendragon Press, Stuyvesant, NY, 1992.
Strogatz, Steven H. Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos. Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, 1994.
Algorithmic symphonies from one line of code -- how and why? posted by viznut, C code one liners for sound synthesis. Also, online interface to try out these sorts of formula
Interesting tutorial on drawing waveforms, for example for writing sound editor software
ICM, chapter 6
CMT chapter 15, p680-688
Robert Rowe. Machine Musicianship. MIT Press, Cambs, MA, 2001.
Robert Rowe. Interactive Music Systems. MIT Press, Cambs, MA, 1993.
Continuator
Voyager (album)
Voyager (paper)
Voyager CD audio examples
Representation issues:
Dannenberg, Roger. 1993. Music representation issues, techniques and systems, Computer Music Journal 17(3):20-30
Henkjan, Honing. 1993. Issues in the representation of time and structure in music, Contemporary Music Review 9: 221-39
Martin, K.D., Scheirer, E.D., and Vercoe, B.L. 1998. Music content
analysis through models of audition, in ACM Workshop on Content
Processing of Media for Multimedia Applications, Bristol
Scheirer, Eric D. 1996. Bregman's chimerae: music perception as auditory
scene analysis, in Proceedings of the International Conference on Music
Perception and Cognition, Montreal
Toiviainen, Petri. 2000. Symbolic AI versus connectionism in music
research, in Miranda, Eduardo (ed.) Readings in Music and Artificial
Intelligence, Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, pp.47-68
ICM, chapter 6
CMT chapter 14
Dan O'Sullivan and Tim Igoe (2004) Physical Computing. Boston, MA: Thomson Course Technology PTR -
Reed Ghazala (2005) Circuit-Bending: Build Your Own Alien Instruments. Chicester: Wiley
Collins, Nicolas (2009) Handmade Electronic Music: The Art of Hardware
Hacking (2nd Edition). New York, NY: Routledge (original 2006)
Tom Igoe (2007) Making Things Talk. O'Reilly Media / Make
Arduino and Wiring
Make magazine
Instructables website
Jaime Oliver: some very nice instrument building projects incorporating computer vision
FaceOSC Computer vision based face tracking as a music controller
Lots of circuit bending/hardware hacking enthusiasts online, and innumerable youtube videos...
Useful wiki for all things sensor : www.sensorwiki.org
Some musical robots and automata:
WAS-2 saxophonist robot: One of many Waseda University musical robots (going back to Wabot-II from 1984, a score reading keyboard playing robot!)
Automatons by Godfried-Willem Raes
LEMUR: League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots
Ajay Kapur
animusic
Pat Metheny's Orchestrion project
Robots aplenty from amorphicrobotworks
2010 Workshop on robots and musical expression
Cybraphon: automated musical robot art project, robot's "mood" affected by online coverage
Programmable Knex Piano-Playing Robot
man-machine orchestra discussion
The Bit-52s: The World's Greatest Robot Parts Band playing The B-52's - Rock Lobster
Another blog posting on musical robots topic
ICM, chapter 3
CMT chapter 12,13
Fabien Gouyon and Simon Dixon. A review of automatic rhythm description systems. Computer Music Journal,
29(1):34-54, 2005.
Eric D. Scheirer. Tempo and beat analysis of acoustic musical signals. J. Acoust. Soc. Am., 103(1):588-601,
January 1998.
Haile the Robotic Drummer
Bill Hsu
John Puterbaugh's Timbre Timeline
[link] Diemo Schwarz. Data-driven Concatenative Sound Synthesis. PhD thesis, Universite Paris 6, 2004.
Sound on Sound article about concatenative synthesis in Cubase via LoopMash
ICM, section 7.2
Nick Collins' SCMIR paper
Music IR information site
Music Information Retrieval Evaluation eXchange comparison of MIR algorithms
MIR Review By Nicola Orio
Some introductory papers on MIR and Java software for MIR is available from Cory McKay's website
An example audio similarity measure paper:
Matthew Cooper and Jonathan Foote. Automatic Music Summarisation via Similarity Analysis. Proceedings of ISMIR 2002 [PDF]
How people can quickly recognise a genre or even a song in well under a
second: Robert O. Gjerdingen and David Perrott (2008)
Scanning the Dial: The Rapid Recognition of Music Genres. Journal of New Music Research
37(2): 93-100 [PDF]
Jorn Loviscach's Do-It-Yourself Semantic Audio lecture
Princeton SoundLab
Beating youtube's audio fingerprinting system
I analyzed the chords of 1300 popular songs for patterns. This is what I found.
Interesting analyses by Matthias Mauch of changes in popular music over time, using MIR tools over last.fm's database
Hit prediction by an academic team, rather than the unknown attempts of a company like Hit Song Science
Blog post about using the Million Song Dataset
ICM, chapter 9
Computing in Musicology series: Center for Computer Assisted Research in the Humanities Stanford University
M. Balaban and K. Ebcioglu and O. Laske (eds.) (1992) Understanding
Music with AI: Perspectives on Music Cognition. Menlo Park, CA: The AAAI
Press/MIT Press
Eric Clarke and Nicholas Cook (eds.) (2004) Empirical Musicology: Aims, Methods, Prospects. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Goffredo Haus (ed.) (1993) Music Processing. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Peter Howell, Robert West and Ian Cross (eds.) (1991) Representing Musical Structure. London: Academic Press
Alan Marsden and Anthony Pople (eds.) (1992) Computer Representations and Models in Music. London: Academic Press
Stephen Travis Pope (ed.) (1991) The Well Tempered Object: Musical
Applications of Object-Oriented Software Technology. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press
Stephen M. Schwanauer and David A. Levitt (eds.) (1993) Machine Models of Music. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
David Temperley (2001) Basic Cognition of Musical Structure. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
David Temperley (2007) Music and Probability. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press