Designing sound
A practitioner's guide to the basic principles of creating sound effects using easily accessed free software. Designing Sound teaches students and professional sound designers to understand and create sound effects starting from nothing. Its thesis is that any sound can be generated from first principles, guided by analysis and synthesis. The text takes a practitioner's perspective, exploring the basic principles of making ordinary, everyday sounds using an easily accessed free software. Readers use the Pure Data (Pd) language to construct sound objects, which are more flexible and useful than recordings. Sound is considered as a process, rather than as data—an approach sometimes known as “procedural audio.” Procedural sound is a living sound effect that can run as computer code and be changed in real time according to unpredictable events. Applications include video games, film, animation, and media in which sound is part of an interactive process. The book takes a practical, systematic approach to the subject, teaching by example and providing background information that offers a firm theoretical context for its pragmatic stance. [Many of the examples follow a pattern, beginning with a discussion of the nature and physics of a sound, proceeding through the development of models and the implementation of examples, to the final step of producing a Pure Data program for the desired sound.
Stats for nerds
10recommend
16mentions
12people
2016–2026years
69% recommend31% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- At the risk of sending you down a giant rabbit hole, the book Designing Sound is all about making programmatic sounds with Pure Data, and open source low-code programming environment available for all platforms. From what I've read, the book is considered a classic in the video game sound world. It's really good. Combine that with the Cipriani book on PD and learning Ardour would give you a very good learning path.
- I don’t know what the best book would be, but I found this extract from Andy Farnell’s book “Designing Sound” to be a very helpful introduction to Pure Data:
http://aspress.co.uk/ds/pdf/pd_intro.pdf
Another useful book is “Loadbang - ProgrammingElectronic Music in Pd” by Johannes Kreidler. The 2nd edition is evidently out of print, but a free download is available here:
https://www.wolke-verlag.de/musikbuecher/johannes-kreidler-l...
- A few additional/alternative reading recommendations:
Proceedings of the International Conference on Digital Audio Effects (DAFx). All open access at https://dafx.de/
Jon Dattorro's Effect Design papers:
https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~dattorro/EffectDesignPart1.pdf
https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~dattorro/EffectDesignPart2.pdf
https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~dattorro/EffectDesignPart3.pdf
Vadim Zavalishin - The Art Of VA Filter Design https://www.native-instruments.com/fileadmin/ni_media/downlo...
Proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference (open access) https://quod.lib.umich.edu/i/icmc/
Andy Farnell, "Designing Sound"
A standard introductory DSP textbook such as Ifeachor and Jervis, Orfanidis, Oppenheim and Schafer.
"The Computer Music Tutorial" and "Microsound" by Curtis Roads
Audio Anecdotes book series
"Music, Cognition and Computerised Sound", edited by Perry Cook
what am I missing?
- This is essentially sound design from first principles. There's a good book here: https://www.amazon.com/Designing-Sound-Press-Andy-Farnell/dp... Note that the software used (Pure Data) can be replaced by another high-level language (SuperCollider: https://supercollider.github.io/) pretty easily. I know of no "tool" to do what you want because there are few things that are universal to different kinds of natural and unnatural sound. (Note: study acoustics and psycho-acoustics to better understand why the former is true.)
- Designing Sound, by Andy Farnell
- A pretty specific and weird, but interesting alternative is PureData, a sort of visual programming language where you can build your own "analog" synths and effects.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7Gv7SR0Nrk
It's very easy to get started, and extremely powerful. Not sure how well it covers your use case, but it's fun.
There's a great introduction to PureData called Designing Sound by Andy Farnell.
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