(Third Edition updated for MAX 7) Structured for use in university courses, the book is an overview of the theory and practice of Max and MSP, with a glossary of terms and suggested tests that allow students to evaluate their progress. Comprehensive online support, running parallel to the explanations in the book, includes hundreds of sample patches, analyses, interactive sound-building exercises, and reverse engineering exercises. This book will provide a reader with skill and understanding in using Max/MSP for sound design and musical composition.

(Third Edition updated for MAX 8) This is the second in a series of volumes dedicated to digital synthesis and sound design. Hundreds of sound examples and interactive examples, programs written in Max, as well as a library of Max objects created especially for this book. Structured for use in university courses.

The book is an overview of the theory and practice of Pure Data, with a glossary of terms and suggested tests that allow students to evaluate their progress. Comprehensive online support, running parallel to the explanations in the book, includes hundreds of sample patches, analyses, interactive sound-building exercises, and reverse engineering exercises. This book will provide a reader with skill and understanding in using Pure Data for sound design and musical composition.

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. Different synthesis methods are discussed, analyzed, and refined throughout.] After mastering the techniques presented in Designing Sound, students will be able to build their own sound objects for use in interactive applications and other projects

The author covers the development of the electronic musical instrument from Thaddeus Cahill's Telharmonium at the turn of the last century to the MIDI synthesizers of the 1990s. --book cover.