The Theory and Technique of Electronic Music

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1. spacechild1Jul 2025
   Just slimmed some chapters, but this looks like a great resource! If someone wants to dive more deeply into digital synthesis, I can recommend "The Theory and Technique of Electronic Music" by Miller Puckette (creator of Max and Pure Data): https://msp.ucsd.edu/techniques/latest/book.pdf. All examples are actually Pure Data patches that you can try out and experiment with.
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2. spacechild1Dec 2024
   > "The Theory and Technique of Electronic Music is a uniquely complete source of information for the computer synthesis of rich and interesting musical timbres."

   It's really a great book, but it is far from "complete" as it omits some very important synthesis techniques - most notably granular synthesis and physical modeling! To be fair, no single book would be able to cover the entire spectrum of electronic sound synthesis. The second edition of "The Computer Music Tutorial" by Curtis Roads (https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262044912/the-computer-music-tu...) comes close, but it is a massive book with over 1200 pages and took literally decades to write. (The second edition has been published 27 years after the first edition!)

   What I find really cool about Miller's book is that all examples are written in Pd so anyone can try them out and experiment further.

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3. chaosprintJun 2024
   My most recommended method for beginners has always been PD (https://puredata.info/) combined with The Theory and Technique of Electronic Music: (https://msp.ucsd.edu/techniques/latest/book.pdf) and this book (https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262014410/designing-sound/).

   Eli's tutorials on SuperCollider are also very helpful: https://www.youtube.com/@elifieldsteel

   Of course, you can have a look at my project Glicol that can also be helpful for people to get some intuition on live coding in browsers immediately: https://glicol.org/

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4. chaosprintOct 2022
   You can find many [abstractions] doing the job you request. The key is to learn how to build them from scratch.

   You can read Miller's book: The Theory and Technique of Electronic Music

   It's free online.

   Also these two tutorials are very helpful: https://archive.flossmanuals.net/pure-data/ http://www.pd-tutorial.com/

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5. risktoparkSep 2022
   There are some good books...

   Delton T Horn's Music Synthesizers a manual of design and construction. http://lucmorton.com/lucstuf/pdf/Music%20Synthesizers%20-%20...

   Miller Puckette's theory and technique of electronic music http://msp.ucsd.edu/techniques.htm

   Dave Bensons music a mathematical offering: https://homepages.abdn.ac.uk/d.j.benson/pages/html/maths-mus...

   Here is a list of other good reference books: https://sdiy.info/wiki/Synth_DIY_books Also, if you don't mind digital - have you seen the daisy ecosystem?

   https://www.electro-smith.com/ https://github.com/electro-smith/DaisyWiki/wiki

   They have built a DSP library with a lot of the basics, there are plenty of example projects, and a supportive community.

   https://github.com/electro-smith/DaisyExamples https://forum.electro-smith.com/

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6. prvcAug 2022
   Highly recommended: "The Theory and Technique of Electronic Music", which is both an accessible and conceptually coherent introduction to the topic.
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