Texts

All students in the course must purchase and study the audio CD

• A. J. M. Houtsma, T. D. Rossing, W. M. Wagenaars. Auditory Demonstrations (an audio CD). Philips 1126-061 (1987). This CD provides the most efficient way that I know to get a firm intuitive grasp of auditory perception. I will sell copies in class for $20 each (I got them at members' discount). The CD is also available from the Acoustical Society of America for about $25. Think about joining the ASA.
  
  

There is no really appropriate published textbook for this course. I have written some rather encyclopaedic

• Lecture Notes on Digital Sound Modeling

I also wrote a brief

• summary of audio perception

There are some optional books that cover some of the material rather well, and which you should consider adding to your personal library.

1. Curtis Roads. The Computer Music Tutorial. MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1996. This book costs $50, but it's huge and has a lot of interesting material. Much of it is about music performance, but there is a lot of general material on sound, too. The bookstore has this one. If you're serious about computer music, you need this in your library.
   
   
2. John Strawn, editor. Digital Audio Signal Processing: an anthology. William Kaufmann, Los Altos CA, 1985. A-R Editions, Madison WI. This is a nice cheap book (about $25), covering several elementary topics in the basic mathematics of sound very well, and with a particularly accessible treatment of digital filter theory. It also has some wacky chapters. Unfortunately, it is out of print. You may be able to find a used copy.
   
   
3. Ken Steiglitz. A Digital Signal Processing Primer. Addison-Wesley, 1995. ISBN 0-8053-1684-1. This is a clearly written short text on the basic methods of digital sound. I can't use it for a class text because it doesn't focus on listening experiments, and it treats the techniques a bit too uncritically. But, it could be very helpful for understanding the technicalities.
   
   
4. Ronald N. Bracewell. The Fourier Transform and Its Applications. McGraw-Hill, New York, 2nd edition 1986. This is a dense reference for engineers. It has a very nice pictorial dictionary of Fourier Transforms in the back. It cost me $58. Most people don't need this, but anyone who intends to really use the Fourier Transform will bite the bullet and shell out the price, even though it's rather high for a small and specialized item.
   
   
5. William L. Briggs, Van Emden Henson. The DFT: An Owner's Manual for the Discrete Fourier Transform. Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, Philadelphia, 1995. ISBN 0-89871-342-0. I haven't had a chance to read this one yet, but it appears to cover a lot of the tricky points about the difference between continuous-infinite and discrete-finite Fourier transforms.
   
   
6. Dave Phillips. Linux Music & Sound. No Starch Press, San Francisco, 2000. ISBN 1-886411-34-4. A good rough practical guide to free software that's available for sound processing under Linux. It will be out of date soon.
   
   
7. Perry R. Cook, editor. Music, Cognition, and Computerized Sound. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2001. ISBN 0-262-03256-2 (hardcover), 0-262-53190-9 (paperback). Covers lots of good topics, but not as thoroughly as I would like. Here is one sample from the demonstration CD, giving mostly C major triads in different tunings (3,021,420 bytes).
   
   
   • Just tuning
   • Mean tone for C
   • Just tuning
   • Equal temperament
   • Just tuning
   • Mean tone for C
   • C sharp triad played in mean tone for C
   • Mean tone for C

Instead of going to the bookstore, you may wish to order texts from Book Pool, Barnes & Noble online, BigWords, Amazon, or other book vendors.

Copyright Michael J. O'Donnell <michael_odonnell@acm.org>. Licensed for free use.
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