Current Directions in Computer Music Research (System Development Foundation Benchmark Series, 2)

These twenty-one original contributions by composers, behavioral scientists, engineers, and other specialists from many of the international centers of research in computer music provide an inside report on the most sophisticated aspects of digital synthesis, control and understanding of musical sound, and related work on perception. Among the specific topics covered are speech songs, synthesis of the singing voice, spatial reverberation, the simulation of bowed instruments, and a conductor program utilizing a mechanical baton. A chapter authored jointly by Mathews and Pierce describes a new musical scale they have been working on for the past few years.

Composers and theorists will find this invaluable book authoritive, as it surveys through sophisticated current techniques of digital processing the nature of musical sound-signals and their interrelationships.―David Lewin, Department of Music, Harvard University

Two of the few, true scientific pioneers of the application of the power of the computer to musical ends have edited a collection of authoritative, stimulating articles whose scope is certain to extend the technological horizons of the musician, and the musical awareness of the technologist. they will instruct and inform further the practitioner, and invite and initiate those who wish to become practitioners.―Milton Babbitt, Department of Music, Princeton University and the Julliard School