Microsound
"Below the level of the musical note lies the realm of microsound, of sound particles lasting less than one-tenth of a second. Recent technological advances allow us to probe and manipulate these pinpoints of sound, dissolving the traditional building blocks of music - notes and their intervals - into a more fluid and supple medium. The sensations of point, pulse (series of points), line (tone), and surface (texture) emerge as particle density increases. Sounds coalesce, evaporate, and mutate into other sounds." "Composers have used theories of microsound in computer music since the 1950s. Distinguished practitioners include Karlheinz Stockhausen and Iannis Xenakis. Today, with the increased interest in computer and electronic music, many young composers and software synthesis developers are exploring its advantages. Covering all aspects of composition with sound particles, Microsound offers composition theory, historical accounts, technical overviews, acoustical experiments, descriptions of musical works, and aesthetic reflections. The book is accompanied by an audio CD of examples."--Jacket.
Stats for nerds
2recommend
3mentions
3people
2022–2024years
67% recommend33% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- 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?
- Yeah, the classics are evergreen. Beyond Roads' Computer Music Tutorial, his Microsound is also a classic of the genre and IMO one of the best treatments I've seen of time-based artforms, situating compositional practice in between the Planck time as the lower bound and the age of the universe as the upper. :-)
Allen Strange also wrote a manual for programming the Buchla Music Easel synth:
https://buchla.com/guides/Buchla_Music_Easel_Manual.pdf
Minus the patch storage of the original hardware, you can work through it using Arturia's Buchla Easel standalone/plugin software:
https://www.arturia.com/products/software-instruments/buchla...
- > "The Computer Music Tutorial" and "Microsound" by Curtis Roads
It's worth noting that the second edition has been just released last year - 27 years after the first edition! It's a massive book: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262044912/the-computer-music-tu...
Related
The computer music tutorial
11 recommend · 20
Designing sound
10 recommend · 16
Microserfs
48 recommend · 103
Microinteractions
3 recommend · 4
The Future Was Here
10 recommend · 21
2017–2026
Blood, sweat, and pixels
28 recommend · 50
Ways of Seeing
24 recommend · 35
