Digital technology has changed the ways in which music is perceived, stored, distributed, mediated and created. The world of music is now a vast and complex jungle, teeming with CDs, MP3s, concerts, clubs, festivals, conferences, exhibitions, installations, websites, software programmes, scenes, Ideas and competing theories. In the eye of the storm stands David Toop, shedding light on the most interesting music now being made - on laptops, In downtown bars in Tokyo, wherever he finds it. Haunted Weather is part personal memoir and part travel journal, as well as an intensive survey of recent developments in digital technology, sonic theory and musical practice. Along the way Toop probes into the meaning of sound (and silence), offering fascinating insights into how computers can be used for improvisation. His wealth of musical knowledge provides inspiration for anyone interested in music.

We are surrounded by noise; we must be able to separate the signals we want to hear from those we do not. To overcome this 'cocktail party effect' we have developed various strategies; endowing computers with similar abilities would enable the development of devices such as intelligent hearing aids and robust speech recognition systems. This book describes a system which attempts to separate multiple, simultaneous acoustic sources using strategies based on those used by humans. It is both a review of recent work on the modelling of auditory processes, and a presentation of a new model in which acoustic signals are decomposed into elements. These structures are then re-assembled in accordance with rules of auditory organisation which operate to bind together elements that are likely to have arisen from the same source. The model is evaluated by measuring its ability to separate speech from a wide variety of other sounds, including music, phones and other speech.

Cutting-edge perspectives on a hot topic, with few competing titles on the market Contributor list includes some very well known professionals, as well as diverse academics from different disciplines Accessible and interdisciplinary introductory volume

The Book of Audacity is the definitive guide to Audacity, the powerful, free, cross-platform audio editor. Audacity allows anyone to transform their Windows, Mac, or Linux computer into a powerful recording studio. The Book of Audacity is the perfect book for bands on a budget, solo artists, audiophiles, and anyone who wants to learn more about digital audio. Musician and podcaster Carla Schroder will guide you through a range of fun and useful Audacity projects that will demystify that geeky audio jargon and show you how to get the most from Audacity. You ll learn how to: Record podcasts, interviews, and live performances Be your own backing band or chorus Edit, splice, mix, and master multitrack recordings Create super high-fidelity and surround-sound recordings Digitize your vinyl or tape collection and clean up noise, hisses, and clicks Create custom ringtones and sweet special effects In addition, you ll learn how to choose and use digital audio hardware like mics and pream

Introduction to Digital Speech Processing highlights the central role of DSP techniques in modern speech communication research and applications. It presents a comprehensive overview of digital speech processing that ranges from the basic nature of the speech signal, through a variety of methods of representing speech in digital form, to applications in voice communication and automatic synthesis and recognition of speech. Introduction to Digital Speech Processing provides the reader with a practical introduction to the wide range of important concepts that comprise the field of digital speech processing. It serves as an invaluable reference for students embarking on speech research as well as the experienced researcher already working in the field, who can utilize the book as a reference guide.

Go beyond HTML5's Audio tag and boost the audio capabilities of your web application with the Web Audio API. Packed with lots of code examples, crisp descriptions, and useful illustrations, this concise guide shows you how to use this JavaScript API to make the sounds and music of your games and interactive applications come alive. You need little or no digital audio expertise to get started. Author Boris Smus introduces you to digital audio concepts, then shows you how the Web Audio API solves specific application audio problems. You'll not only learn how to synthesize and process digital audio, you'll also explore audio analysis and visualization with this API. Learn Web Audio API, including audio graphs and the audio nodes Provide quick feedback to user actions by scheduling sounds with the API's precise timing model Control gain, volume, and loudness, and dive into clipping and crossfading Understand pitch and frequency: use tools to manipulate soundforms directly with JavaScript Generate synthetic sound effects and learn how to spatialize sound in 3D space Use Web Audio API with the Audio tag, getUserMedia, and the Page Visibility API

Strike a balance between theory and practice! With this text, you'll, find a balance between theory and practice that allows you to build your understanding of the basic concepts, assumptions, and limitations of the theory of speech analysis and synthesis. The methods for data analysis as well as the theoretical background are provided to help you comprehend the analysis results. And you'll be able to study the features and properties of speech as a signal without having to record data and write software to analyze the data. The text includes two CDs that contain stand-alone and MATLAB software and speech and electroglottographic data. The CDs illustrate the effects that speech models and speech analysis procedures have on the quality of synthesized speech. An extensive speech database provides numerous speech files and other data. Examples included in each chapter demonstrate how to use the software. The CDs allow you to:
* Calculate the parameters of linear prediction speech models.
* Examine procedures for converting the speech of one speaker to sound like that of another speaker (i.e., voice conversion).
* Analyze and alter the temporal structure of the speech signal. This allows you to automatically parse speech into various features, such as voiced segments, unvoiced segments, nasal and non-nasal segments, fricatives, stops, and more.
* Create speech with a "high speaking rate" or generate speech with a "slow speaking rate."
* Adjust the parameters of the vocal fold model to change the vocal fold tension, length, thickness, mass, etc., in order to observe the effects of these parameters on the vibratory motion of the vocal folds.

"Speech Processing and Soft Computing" includes coverage of synergy between speech technology and bio-inspired soft computing methods. Through practical cases, the author explores, dissects and examines how soft computing may complement conventional techniques in speech enhancement and speech recognition in order to provide robust systems. The material is especially useful to graduate students and experienced researchers who are interested in expanding their horizons and investigating new research directions through review of the theoretical and practical settings of soft computing methods in very recent speech applications.

This work addresses this problem in the short-time Fourier transform (STFT) domain. We divide the general problem into five basic categories depending on the number of microphones being used and whether the interframe or interband correlation is considered. The first category deals with the single-channel problem where STFT coefficients at different frames and frequency bands are assumed to be independent. In this case, the noise reduction filter in each frequency band is basically a real gain. Since a gain does not improve the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for any given subband and frame, the noise reduction is basically achieved by liftering the subbands and frames that are less noisy while weighing down on those that are more noisy. The second category also concerns the single-channel problem. The difference is that now the interframe correlation is taken into account and a filter is applied in each subband instead of just a gain. The advantage of using the interframe correlation is that we can improve not only the long-time fullband SNR, but the frame-wise subband SNR as well. The third and fourth classes discuss the problem of multichannel noise reduction in the STFT domain with and without interframe correlation, respectively. In the last category, we consider the interband correlation in the design of the noise reduction filters. We illustrate the basic principle for the single-channel case as an example, while this concept can be generalized to other scenarios. In all categories, we propose different optimization cost functions from which we derive the optimal filters and we also define the performance measures that help analyzing them.

The essential reference to SuperCollider, a powerful, flexible, open-source, cross-platform audio programming language. SuperCollider is one of the most important domain-specific audio programming languages, with potential applications that include real-time interaction, installations, electroacoustic pieces, generative music, and audiovisuals. The SuperCollider Book is the essential reference to this powerful and flexible language, offering students and professionals a collection of tutorials, essays, and projects. With contributions from top academics, artists, and technologists that cover topics at levels from the introductory to the specialized, it will be a valuable sourcebook both for beginners and for advanced users. SuperCollider, first developed by James McCartney, is an accessible blend of Smalltalk, C, and further ideas from a number of programming languages. Free, open-source, cross-platform, and with a diverse and supportive developer community, it is often the first programming language sound artists and computer musicians learn. The SuperCollider Book is the long-awaited guide to the design, syntax, and use of the SuperCollider language. The first chapters offer an introduction to the basics, including a friendly tutorial for absolute beginners, providing the reader with skills that can serve as a foundation for further learning. Later chapters cover more advanced topics and particular topics in computer music, including programming, sonification, spatialization, microsound, GUIs, machine listening, alternative tunings, and non-real-time synthesis; practical applications and philosophical insights from the composer's and artist's perspectives; and "under the hood," developer's-eye views of SuperCollider's inner workings. A Web site accompanying the book offers code, links to the application itself and its source code, and a variety of third-party extras, extensions, libraries, and examples.

David Gibson uses 3D visual representations of sounds in a mix as a tool to explain the dynamics that can be created in a mix. This book provides an in-depth exploration into the aesthetics of what makes a great mix. Gibson's unique approach explains how to map sounds to visuals in order to create a visual framework that can be used to analyze what is going on in any mix. Once you have the framework down, Gibson then uses it to explain the traditions that have be developed over time by great recording engineers for different styles of music and songs. You will come to understand everything that can be done in a mix to create dynamics that affect people in really deep ways. Once you understand what engineers are doing to create the great mixes they do, you can then use this framework to develop your own values as to what you feel is a good mix. Once you have a perspective on what all can be done, you have the power to be truly creative on your own - to create whole new mixing possibilities. It is all about creating art out of technology. This book goes beyond explaining what the equipment does - it explains what to do with the equipment to make the best possible mixes.

Leverage the power of FL Studio 20 to create and compose production-quality songs and develop professional music production skills Key Features Leverage the power of FL Studio to create your own production-level music Develop widely applicable music production skills and learn how to promote your music Utilize cutting-edge tools to fuel your creative ideas and publish your songs Book DescriptionFL Studio is a cutting-edge software music production environment and an extremely powerful and easy-to-use tool for creating music. This book will give you everything you need to produce music with FL Studio like a professional. You'll begin by exploring FL Studio 20's vast array of tools, and discover best practices, tips, and tricks for creating music. You'll then learn how to set up your studio environment, create a beat, compose a melody and chord progression, mix sounds with effects, and export songs. As you advance, you'll find out how to use tools such as the Piano roll, mixer console, audio envelopes, types of compression, equalizers, vocoders, vocal chops, and tools for increasing stereo width. The book introduces you to mixing best practices, and shows you how to master your songs. Along the way, you'll explore glitch effects and create your own instruments and custom-designed effect chains. You'll also cover ZGameEditor Visualizer, a tool used for creating reactive visuals for your songs. Finally, you'll learn how to register, sell, and promote your music. By the end of this FL Studio book, you'll be able to utilize cutting-edge tools to fuel your creative ideas, mix music effectively, and publish your songs. What you will learn Get up and running with FL Studio 20 Record live instruments and vocals and process them Compose melodies and chord progressions on the Piano roll Discover mixing techniques and apply effects to your tracks Explore best practices to produce music like a professional Publish songs in online stores and promote your music effectively Who this book is forThis book is for music producers, composers, songwriters, DJs, and audio engineers interested in creating their own music, improving music production skills, mixing and mastering music, and selling songs online. To get started with this book, all you need is a computer and FL Studio.

Music is much more than listening to audio encoded in some unreadable binary format. It is, instead, an adventure similar to reading a book and entering its world, complete with a story, plot, sound, images, texts, and plenty of related data with, for instance, historical, scientific, literary, and musicological contents. Navigation of this world, such as that of an opera, a jazz suite and jam session, a symphony, a piece from non-Western culture, is possible thanks to the specifications of new standard IEEE 1599, "IEEE Recommended Practice for Defining a Commonly Acceptable Musical Application Using XML," which uses symbols in language XML and music layers to express all its multimedia characteristics. Because of its encompassing features, this standard allows the use of existing audio and video standards, as well as recuperation of material in some old format, the events of which are managed by a single XML file, which is human and machine readable - musical symbols have been read by humans for at least forty centuries.

Anyone wanting to realize a computer application using IEEE 1599 -- music and computer science departments, computer generated music research laboratories (e.g. CCRMA at Stanford, CNMAT at Berkeley, and IRCAM in Paris), music library conservationists, music industry frontrunners (Apple, TDK, Yamaha, Sony), etc. -- will need this first book-length explanation of the new standard as a reference.

The book will include a manual teaching how to encode music with IEEE 1599 as an appendix, plus a CD-R with a video demonstrating the applications described in the text and actual sample applications that the user can load onto his or her PC and experiment with.

Pure Data (Pd) is a graphical programming environment for audio and more; libpd is a wrapper that turns Pd into a portable, embeddable audio library. Brian Eno's soundtrack of the game Spore is generated by Pure Data. Inception The App is based on libpd and has been downloaded more than three million times. The popular RJDJ also uses the technology. The purpose of this book is to present tools and techniques for using Pure Data and libpd as an audio engine in mobile apps (for Android and iOS). The tools described are perfect for the sound engine for a game or for transforming a phone or tablet into an experimental instrument. After reading the book, audio developers will know how to prepare Pd patches for use with libpd, and app developers will know how to use all features of the libpd API. Readers with some experience in both computer music and mobile development will be able to create complete musical apps. The book includes a crash course in Pd, just enough to allow readers to make sounds and control them, as well as a discussion of existing solutions for rapidly deploying Pd patches to mobile devices. An introduction to Android or iOS development is beyond the scope of this book; readers will be expected to have a basic grasp of their platform of choice, including a working development setup. The book will, however, explain how to integrate libpd into an existing setup. A number of sample apps, ranging from minimal to full featured, for both Android and iOS, will illustrate all major points.

Refining Sound is a practical roadmap to the complexities of creating sounds on modern synthesizers. As author, veteran synthesizer instructor Brian K. Shepard draws on his years of experience in synthesizer pedagogy in order to peel back the often-mysterious layers of sound synthesis one-by-one. The result is a book which allows readers to familiarize themselves with each individual step in the synthesis process, in turn empowering them in their own creative or experimental work. The book follows the stages of synthesis in chronological progression, starting readers at the raw materials of sound creation and ultimately bringing them to the final "polishing" stage. Each chapter focuses on a particular aspect of the synthesis process, culminating in a last chapter that brings everything together as the reader creates his/her own complex sounds. Throughout the text, the material is supported by copious examples and illustrations as well as by audio files and synthesis demonstrations on a related companion website. Each chapter contains easily digestible guided projects (entitled "Your Turn" sections) that focus on the topics of the corresponding chapter. In addition to this, one complete project will be carried through each chapter of the book cumulatively, allowing the reader to follow - and build - a sound from start to finish. The final chapter includes several sound creation projects in which readers are given types of sound to create as well as some suggestions and tips, with final outcomes is left to readers' own creativity. Perhaps the most difficult aspect of learning to create sounds on a synthesizer is to understand exactly what each synthesizer component does independent of the synthesizer's numerous other components. Not only does this book thoroughly illustrate and explain these individual components, but it also offers numerous practical demonstrations and exercises that allow the reader to experiment with and understand these elements without the distraction of the other controls and modifiers. Refining Sound is essential for all electronic musicians from amateur to professional levels of accomplishment, students, teachers, libraries, and anyone interested in creating sounds on a synthesizer.

This book offers an overview of audio processing, including the latest advances in the methodologies used in audio processing and speech recognition. First, it discusses the importance of audio indexing and classical information retrieval problem and presents two major indexing techniques, namely Large Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognition (LVCSR) and Phonetic Search. It then offers brief insights into the human speech production system and its modeling, which are required to produce artificial speech. It also discusses various components of an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system. Describing the chronological developments in ASR systems, and briefly examining the statistical models used in ASR as well as the related mathematical deductions, the book summarizes a number of state-of-the-art classification techniques and their application in audio/speech classification. By providing insights into various aspects of audio/speech processing and speech recognition, this book appeals a wide audience, from researchers and postgraduate students to those new to the field.

Understanding Video Game Music develops a musicology of video game music by providing methods and concepts for understanding music in this medium. From the practicalities of investigating the video game as a musical source to the critical perspectives on game music - using examples including Final Fantasy VII, Monkey Island 2, SSX Tricky and Silent Hill - these explorations not only illuminate aspects of game music, but also provide conceptual ideas valuable for future analysis. Music is not a redundant echo of other textual levels of the game, but central to the experience of interacting with video games. As the author likes to describe it, this book is about music for racing a rally car, music for evading zombies, music for dancing, music for solving puzzles, music for saving the Earth from aliens, music for managing a city, music for being a hero; in short, it is about music for playing.

Selling Digital Music, Formatting Culture documents the transition of recorded music on CDs to music as digital files on computers. More than two decades after the first digital music files began circulating in online archives and playing through new software media players, we have yet to fully internalize the cultural and aesthetic consequences of these shifts. Tracing the emergence of what Jeremy Wade Morris calls the "digital music commodity," Selling Digital Music, Formatting Culture considers how a conflicted assemblage of technologies, users, and industries helped reformat popular music's meanings and uses. Through case studies of five key technologies - Winamp, metadata, Napster, iTunes, and cloud computing - this book explores how music listeners gradually came to understand computers and digital files as suitable replacements for their stereos and CD. Morris connects industrial production, popular culture, technology, and commerce in a narrative involving the aesthetics of music and computers, and the labor of producers and everyday users, as well as the value that listeners make and take from digital objects and cultural goods. Above all, Selling Digital Music, Formatting Culture is a sounding out of music's encounters with the interfaces, metadata, and algorithms of digital culture and of why the shifting form of the music commodity matters for the music and other media we love.

'Groundbreaking' Amy Cuddy, bestselling author of Presence 'A roadmap for innovators, entrepreneurs and those seeking new avenues for exploring and reimagining the future' Deepak Chopra Musicians are masters of innovation, constantly finding new ways to adapt to accelerating change and staying ahead of the beat. ------------------------------------------------------------------- In Two Beats Ahead, Michael Hendrix and Panos Panay demystify the artistic process of some of the greatest creative minds of our time and reveal what they can teach us about creativity. Drawing from first person interviews, you'll learn the secrets of collaboration from Beyonce and Pharrell Williams, grasp the value of experimentation with Radiohead and Imogen Heap, learn how to prototype with Jimmy Iovine, hear why Justin Timberlake thinks you should 'dare to suck', understand the power of reinvention from Gloria Estefan, and the art of producing from T Bone Burnett and Hank Shocklee, co-founder of Public Enemy. A musical mindset is a revolutionary framework for creating and innovating in a dynamic world. Two Beats Ahead shows you how ------------------------------------------------------------------- 'Inspiration for anyone looking to expand the reach of their creativity' Tim Brown, author of Change By Design 'Based on their course at Berklee, Michael and Panos show that a musician's perspective, much like a designers perspective, can unlock inspiration and innovation, no matter who you are' David Kelley, founder of IDEO and the Stanford d.school

With this comprehensive guide you will learn how to apply Bayesian machine learning techniques systematically to solve various problems in speech and language processing. A range of statistical models is detailed, from hidden Markov models to Gaussian mixture models, n-gram models and latent topic models, along with applications including automatic speech recognition, speaker verification, and information retrieval. Approximate Bayesian inferences based on MAP, Evidence, Asymptotic, VB, and MCMC approximations are provided as well as full derivations of calculations, useful notations, formulas, and rules. The authors address the difficulties of straightforward applications and provide detailed examples and case studies to demonstrate how you can successfully use practical Bayesian inference methods to improve the performance of information systems. This is an invaluable resource for students, researchers, and industry practitioners working in machine learning, signal processing, and speech and language processing.

Die Optimierung des Web-Auftritts ist fur Entscheider und Mediengestalter ein wesentliches Ziel ihrer Tatigkeit. Anhand von Erkenntnissen der Ergonomie und Arbeitswissenschaft erklart der Autor, was Besucher auf Internetseiten fesselt und zum Kauf anregt, aber auch, was abschreckt. Fur die Planung eines erfolgreichen E-Business-Auftritts vermittelt das Buch wichtige Grundsatze. Fur das Design einer Informationsseite werden Internet-spezifische Prasentationsregeln erlautert, deren Ziel ein Internet-Auftritt ist. Ein Uberblick uber die grundlegenden Internet-Konzepte rundet das Werk ab."