This book is about using electronic techniques to record, synthesize, process, and analyze musical sounds, a practice which came into its modern form in the years 1948-1952, but whose technological means and artistic uses have undergone several revolutions since then. Nowadays most electronic music is made using computers, and this book will focus exclusively on what used to be called 'computer music', but which should really now be called 'electronic music using a computer'.

Most of the available computer music tools have antecedents in earlier generations of equipment. The computer, however, is relatively cheap and the results of using one are much easier to document and re-create than those of earlier generations of equipment. In these respects at least, the computer makes the ideal electronic music instrument--until someone invents something even cheaper and more flexible than a computer.

The techniques and practices of electronic music can be studied (at least in theory) without making explicit reference to the current state of technology. Still, it's important to provide working examples of them. So each chapter starts with theory (without any reference to implementation) and ends with a series of examples realized in a currently available software package.

The ideal reader of this book is anyone who knows and likes electronic music of any genre, has plenty of facility with computers in general, and who wants to learn how to make electronic music from the ground up, starting with the humble oscillator and continuing through sampling, FM, filtering, waveshaping, delays, and so on. This will take plenty of time.

This book doesn't concern itself with the easier route of downloading pre-cooked software to try out these techniques; instead, the emphasis is on learning how to use a general-purpose computer music environment to realize them yourself. Of the several such packages are available, we'll use Pd, but that shouldn't stop you from using these same techniques in some other environment such as Csound or Max/MSP. To facilitate this, each chapter is divided into a software-independent discussion of theory, followed by actual examples in Pd, which you can transpose into your own favorite package. >from *Theory and Techniques of Electronic Music* by Miller Puckette.

Miller Puckette is also the author of Pure data (pd), a graphical programming language for the creation of interactive computer music and multimedia works, written in the 1990s with input from many others in the computer music and free software communities. >from *Miller Puckette* in the Wikipedia. via x4v1

PD (aka Pure Data) is a real-time graphical programming environment for audio, video, and graphical processing. It is the third major branch of the family of patcher programming languages known as Max (Max/FTS, ISPW Max, Max/MSP, jMax, etc.) originally developed by Miller Puckette and company at IRCAM. The core of Pd is written and maintained by Miller Puckette and includes the work of many developers, making the whole package very much a community effort. >from *About Pure Data*

openfriday@straddle3
···························
with miller puckette, yves degollon, günter geiger
friday, september 9, 2005. 20 h
straddle3. c/ riereta, 32 1-3
barcelona

miller puckette speech (theora/vorbis)
miller puckette speech (vorbis). enregistered by valentina messeri

related context
> 120 years of electronic music. electronic musical instrument 1870 - 1990
> pure data convention. september, 2004
> pd open dev: puredata open development/devices. january 30, 2004
> the free software community after 20 years. january 13, 2004
> open-source practices in software engineering. december 12, 2003
> open source communities. april 21, 2003
> a new cultural movement?. august 7, 2002. updated on october 22, 2003

imago
> how do you play with puredata
the music and graphs of a vatican museum musical score?

sonic flow
> pulling data to the sounding point [stream]
pulling data to the sounding point [download]