Human and Machine Hearing is the first book to comprehensively describe how human hearing works and how to build machines to analyze sounds in the same way that people do. Drawing on over thirty-five years of experience in analyzing hearing and building systems, Richard F. Lyon explains how we can now build machines with close-to-human abilities in speech, music, and other sound-understanding domains. He explains human hearing in terms of engineering concepts, and describes how to incorporate those concepts into machines for a wide range of modern applications. The details of this approach are presented at an accessible level, to bring a diverse range of readers, from neuroscience to engineering, to a common technical understanding. The description of hearing as signal-processing algorithms is supported by corresponding open-source code, for which the book serves as motivating documentation.

Human and Machine Hearing: Extracting Meaning from Sound

The development of formal, descriptive, and procedural notations has become a practical concern within the field of music now that computers are being applied to musical tasks. Music combines the real-time demands of performance with the intellectual demands of highly developed symbolic systems that are quite different from natural language. The richness and variety of these demands makes the programming language paradigm a natural one in the musical application of computers. This paradigm provides musicians with a fresh perspective on their work. At the same time, music is a very advanced form of human endeavor, making computer music applications a worthy challenge for computer scientists. In this paper we outline the traditional tasks and forms of representation in music, then proceed with a survey of languages that deal with music programming.

Programming languages for computer music synthesis, performance, and composition

The origin of the technology and methodology of modern computer music is certainly the Music V family of software sound synthesis systems developed since the late 1950s. In the “old days,” this consisted of batch computer processing of musical programs expressed in terms of instrument definitions (programs) and score note lists (input data), generating sampled sound output data to off-line storage for later performance. The noticeable rekindling of interest in programs and languages for software sound synthesis (SWSS) and software digital audio signal processing (DSP) using general-purpose computers is due to a number of factors, not least among them the dramatic increase in the power of personal workstations over the last five years. There are currently three widely-used, portable, C-language SWSS tools: (in alphabetical order) cmix (Lansky 1990), cmusic (Moore 1990), and Csound (Vercoe 1991). This article will discuss the technology of SWSS and then present and compare these three systems. It is divided into three parts; the first introduces SWSS in terms of progressive examples. Part two compares the three systems using the same two instrument/score examples written in each of them. The final section presents informal benchmark tests of the systems run on two different hardware platforms—a Sun Microsystems SPARCstation-2 IPX and a Next Computer Inc. TurboCube machine—and subjective comments on various features of the languages and programming environments of stateof-the-art SWSS software. This author’s connection with this topic is that of extensive experience with several different SWSS systems over the last 15 years, starting with MUS10 and including all three compared here: Csound (in the form of Music-11 initially) at the CMRS studio in Salzburg (Pope 1982); cmusic in the CARL environment at PCS/Cadmus computers in Munich (Pope 1986); and more recently a combination of cmix, Csound, and various vocoder software packages with user interfaces written in Smalltalk-80 at the CCRMA Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics at Stanford University (Pope

Machine Tongues XV: Three Packages for Software Sound Synthesis

This article traces the history and evolution of Music Programming, from the early off-line synthesis programs of the MUSIC N family to modern realtime interactive systems. It explores the main design characteristics of these systems and their impact on Computer Music. In chronological fashion, the article will examine, with code examples, the development of the early systems into the most common modern languages currently in use. In particular, we will focus on Csound, highlighting its main internal aspects and its applications. The text will also explore the various paradigms that have oriented the design and use of music programming systems. This discussion is completed by a consideration of computer music eco-systems and their pervasiveness in today’s practice.

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The Development of Computer Music Programming Systems

For Otto Laske: A Communicational Approach to Computer Sound Programs

A program for synthesizing music and psychological stimuli on a digital computer is described. The sound is produced by three operations: (a) A compiler generates the programs for a set of instruments. (b) These instruments are “played” by a sequencing program at the command of a sequence of “note” cards which contain information analogous to that given by conventional music notes. (c) The computer output, in the form of numbers on a digital magnetic tape, is converted to audible sound by a digital-to-analog converter, a desampling filter, and a loudspeaker. By virtue of the general nature of the compiling program a great variety of instruments may be produced, and the instrument programs are quite efficient in terms of computer time. The “note” cards are arranged to minimize the effort necessary to specify a composition. Preliminary compositions indicate that exceedingly interesting music and useful psychological stimuli can be generated.

Max V. Mathews

Papers

An acoustic compiler for music and psychological stimuli