I teach an evening class in acoustics and sound synthesis, a part of the EMS two year course in electroacoustic music. I’ve taught these classes since 1999, and since EMS does not require any formal education for entering the course, the main challenge has always been explaining physical and mathematical concepts in plain language and illustrations. Here are some links to online resources that I’ve found useful.
Acoustics
- Carl Rod Nave‘s HyperPhysics, especially the Sound and hearing section
- Daniel A. Russell‘s Acoustics and vibration animations for teaching acoustics
- David J. Benson‘s Music: a mathematical offering
- The Sound object project book (PDF)
DSP
- Mark Dolson’s The phase vocoder: a tutorial from CMJ (scanned by Swedish keyboardist Jens Johansson, son of jazz pianist Jan Johansson). Also available in an HTML earlier version
- Bores signal processing online classes: Introduction to DSP and Advanced DSP
- Stephan Bernsee’s DSP Dimension Signal processing tutorials (FFT/phase vocoder)
- Steve Smith‘s The scientist and engineer’s guide to digital signal processing (free online book)
- DSPRelated.com, a portal and community for DSP
Sound synthesis
- James C. Clark‘s Advanced programming techniques for modular synthesizers (includes example patches for Clavia Nord Modular)
- Øyvind Hammer’s Digital lydbehandling (PDF in Norwegian) from Notam
Pd
Although we use Max/MSP and not Pd on the course, there are many similarities between them, so these free books could be useful (via Create Digital Music):
- Johannes Kreidler‘s Programming electronic music in Pd
- IOhannes m zmoelnig‘s bang | pure data
- Miller Puckette‘s Theory and technique of electronic music
There is also a free manual at Flossmanuals. (Thanks to Jonas Enqvist for the tip!)
Software
- Manuel Op de Coul’s Scala, a tuning utility hosted by the Huygens-Fokker centre for microtonal music)
- Michael Klingbeil‘s SPEAR, Fourier-based sinusoidal modelling for OS X
- Xavier Serra‘s SMS, spectral modelling synthesis
Updated July 25, 2010
Great list. Mark Dolson’s tutorial on the Phase Vocoder is indeed a fundamental text, and not used enough by teachers in my opinion.
Maybe you would find something of interested in my article “A Tutorial on Spectral Sound Processing with Max/MSP and Jitter”. It’s published in the Computer Music Journal, and free to download from mitpressjournals.org
All the best,
Jean-François Charles.
Thanks! Here’s the link to the article.