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Comment by chaosprint | Hacker News Reader

One of the classics and must-reads in music technology.

I read it over and over again when I was building: https://glicol.org/

One of the motivations for building Glicol is to quickly let more people understand sound synthesis and music programming in the browser.

also recommand:

Designing Audio Effect Plugins in C++ by Will Pirkle

Audio Effects Theory, Implementation and Application By Joshua Reiss, Andrew McPherson

And all the books by JULIUS O. SMITH III https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~jos/filters/Book_Series_Overview...

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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?

Boulanger and Lazzarini "The Audio Programming Book" - great if you want to start working straight away in C

Boulanger - "The Csound Book" (another classic language I still use today)

Greenbaum and Barzel - "Audio Anecdotes". A fascinating series of 3 volumes with all sorts of wisdom on FX design, studio systems and composition

Wilson, Cottle and Collins - "The Supercollider Book". In the style of The Csound Book, but with SC.

Loy - "Musicmathics". A rare and much under-rated two volume set on the equations behind audio DSP

Bilbao - "Numerical Sound Synthesis". A hard but rewarding journey to understanding audio physics as linear diff systems and implementing them efficiently in C, Goes well with Perry Cook's stuff.

Benson - "Music a mathematical offering" Very unusual book that analyses many subjects in music physics. Equations but no code.

Miranda "Computer Sound Design". More about music synthesis than "sound design" imho, but has some interesting fringe methods like cellular autonoma and genetic algorithms.

>Boulanger - "The Csound Book"

Probably the gold standard for such books, wish all the audio DSLs had a book of such quality. Between it and The Computer Music Tutorial Csound is ahead of the rest when it comes to books.

Edit: Was thinking The Computer Music Tutorial was filled with Csound examples but on second thought I don't think it actually is. Been awhile since I last browsed it.

No, The Computer Music Tutorial doesn't have any code as far as I remember. I know there is a second edition but not sure what is new in there.

The Csound book is so great though. It would be nice if the orc/sco on the CD that came with it were available. I have the book still but the CD is long gone and so is owning a CD rom drive.

I just came back to csound recently and I think it has taken me about 25 years to actually like the sco. If one is use to a piano roll/DAW, the sco seems utterly ridiculous.

The csound manual now though actually has good working examples too. If I remember, that was not the case when the csound book came out and part of what made it so great too.

>I have the book still but the CD is long gone and so is owning a CD rom drive.

https://github.com/SamKomesarook/The-Csound-Book

Awesome. The book is such a bargain used then on Amazon with this.

> "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...

Do you think it is worth upgrading from the first edition? Does it update much of the old information? The new chapters alone are not really enough to sell me on buying, at least not until my first edition falls apart.

> Does it update much of the old information?

There is lots of information and even whole chapters that couldn't have been possibly written in 1996, but I haven't read the first edition so I can't really compare in detail.

FM Theory and Applications By Dr John Chowning and David Bristow https://www.burnkit2600.com/manuals/fm_theory_and_applicatio...

Mostly focused on FM as applied by the DX7 IIRC. But really good overview of how FM works since it's the guy who invented it.

Glicol looking super cool! Reminds me of ChucK https://chuck.cs.princeton.edu

Your "on phone" or desktop synthesizer is amazing. Thanks for that. I shared with my more musical synth type friends. Your program reminds us, of how amazing music can be, with such a simple backbone. (Just as in the case of a harmonica or whistle, where a few notes, can invoke a range of emotions.) So easy to see the results of ones own experimentation.

Charles Dodge and Thomas A. Jerse, 1997. Computer Music: Synthesis, Composition and Performance. Schirmer Books, New York. 2nd Ed. 455pp. ISBN 0-02-864682-7. {Glossary; Index. 100s of figures, formulas.} Highly recommended.

Thanks for pointing to Glicol; this is amazing; looks like some kind of marriage of Chuck and Faust; or to which other language would you compare it? Just looked around a bit on the sites, but didn't see a language specification. Can you provide a hint, please.

Is this some kind of master or PhD work, or just a hobby project?

it's one of my phd works. there was a conference paper but it seems that the database of the whole conf was gone...

still you can find some philosophy here:

https://github.com/chaosprint/glicol

the glicol-cli is also a relatively special work:

https://github.com/glicol/glicol-cli

Is there a link or copy of the conference paper or the PhD thesis?

here:

https://webaudioconf.com/posts/2021_8/

the video is still there

Thanks. I was able to download the paper from https://webaudioconf.com/_data/papers/pdf/2021/2021_8.pdf (the original link didn't work). Is the PhD thesis also available somewhere?

What are your experiences with Rust? Was it worth it, or would you rather consider another language for similar projects?

Rust is in my opinion probably the best language so far for audio/music infrastructure. So for me personally, I would not consider another language for this type of work. But I am definitely not saying that Rust is suitable for any job.

Interesting, thanks.

glicol is super super cool, thanks for sharing!

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