Best-selling recording guide from one of our most well-regarded authors, accessible for students, professionals and amateurs alike Updated second edition with new content on cutting-edge technologies, as well as new voices from a more diverse group of producers Accompanied by author-hosted online resources, including 300+ audio examples, free backing tracks and further reading

A practitioner's guide to the basic principles of creating sound effects using easily accessed free software. Designing Sound teaches students and professional sound designers to understand and create sound effects starting from nothing. Its thesis is that any sound can be generated from first principles, guided by analysis and synthesis. The text takes a practitioner's perspective, exploring the basic principles of making ordinary, everyday sounds using an easily accessed free software. Readers use the Pure Data (Pd) language to construct sound objects, which are more flexible and useful than recordings. Sound is considered as a process, rather than as data-an approach sometimes known as "procedural audio." Procedural sound is a living sound effect that can run as computer code and be changed in real time according to unpredictable events. Applications include video games, film, animation, and media in which sound is part of an interactive process. The book takes a practical, systematic approach to the subject, teaching by example and providing background information that offers a firm theoretical context for its pragmatic stance. [Many of the examples follow a pattern, beginning with a discussion of the nature and physics of a sound, proceeding through the development of models and the implementation of examples, to the final step of producing a Pure Data program for the desired sound. Different synthesis methods are discussed, analyzed, and refined throughout.] After mastering the techniques presented in Designing Sound, students will be able to build their own sound objects for use in interactive applications and other projects

Electronic music instruments weren't called synthesizers until the 1950s, but their lineage began in 1919 with Russian inventor Lev Sergeyevich Termen's development of the Etherphone, now known as the Theremin. From that point, synthesizers have undergone a remarkable evolution from prohibitively large mid-century models confined to university laboratories to the development of musical synthesis software that runs on tablet computers and portable media devices.
Throughout its history, the synthesizer has always been at the forefront of technology for the arts. In The Synthesizer: A Comprehensive Guide to Understanding, Programming, Playing, and Recording the Ultimate Electronic Music Instrument, veteran music technology journalist, educator, and performer Mark Vail tells the complete story of the synthesizer: the origins of the many forms the instrument takes; crucial advancements in sound generation, musical control, and composition made with instruments that may have become best sellers or gone entirely unnoticed; and the basics and intricacies of acoustics and synthesized sound. Vail also describes how to successfully select, program, and play a synthesizer; what alternative controllers exist for creating electronic music; and how to stay focused and productive when faced with a room full of instruments. This one-stop reference guide on all things synthesizer also offers tips on encouraging creativity, layering sounds, performance, composing and recording for film and television, and much more.

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.

Natural language processing (NLP) is a scientific discipline which is found at the interface of computer science, artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology. Providing an overview of international work in this interdisciplinary field, this book gives the reader a panoramic view of both early and current research in NLP. Carefully chosen multilingual examples present the state of the art of a mature field which is in a constant state of evolution. In four chapters, this book presents the fundamental concepts of phonetics and phonology and the two most important applications in the field of speech processing: recognition and synthesis. Also presented are the fundamental concepts of corpus linguistics and the basic concepts of morphology and its NLP applications such as stemming and part of speech tagging. The fundamental notions and the most important syntactic theories are presented, as well as the different approaches to syntactic parsing with reference to cognitive models, algorithms and computer applications.

With this comprehensive and accessible introduction to the field, you will gain all the skills and knowledge needed to work with current and future audio, speech, and hearing processing technologies. Topics covered include mobile telephony, human-computer interfacing through speech, medical applications of speech and hearing technology, electronic music, audio compression and reproduction, big data audio systems and the analysis of sounds in the environment. All of this is supported by numerous practical illustrations, exercises, and hands-on MATLAB (R) examples on topics as diverse as psychoacoustics (including some auditory illusions), voice changers, speech compression, signal analysis and visualisation, stereo processing, low-frequency ultrasonic scanning, and machine learning techniques for big data. With its pragmatic and application driven focus, and concise explanations, this is an essential resource for anyone who wants to rapidly gain a practical understanding of speech and audio processing and technology.

Since 2002, the overall minutes of use and costs for the Telecommunications Relay Service (TRS) program have grown significantly due to the advent of Internet-based forms of TRS and increased usage by the deaf and hard-of-hearing communities. TRS allows persons with hearing or speech disabilities to place and receive telephone calls, often with the help of a communications assistant who acts as a translator or facilitator between the two parties having the conversation. FCC is the steward of the TRS program and the federal TRS Fund, which reimburses TRS providers. This book examines, among other things, changes in TRS services and costs since 2002; FCC's TRS performance goals and measures and how they compare with key characteristics of successful performance goals and measures; and the extent to which the design of the program's internal control system identifies and considers program risks.

In today's digital age, learning and creating music has never been so easy and affordable. Anyone can enhance their musical knowledge, skills, and creativity with the multitude of music apps available. However, sifting through thousands of music apps in the Apple App Store and Google Play can be a daunting task for any musician or music instructor. But not anymore! Having spent countless hours researching the most interesting useful, educational, fun, and easy-to-use music apps, Elizabeth C. Axford in Music Apps for Musicians and Music Teachers surveys the landscape of music-related apps for both iOS and Android mobile devices, including tablets and smartphones. Music Apps for Musicians and Music Teachers lists hundreds of music-related apps organized by category, including singing, musical instruments, music theory and composition, songwriting, improvisation, recording, evaluating music performances, listening to music, music history and literature, music appreciation, and more. App developers are listed with each app, including links to their websites for updates and support. The book sections and chapters align with the newly revised National Standards for Music Education released in 2014 by the National Association for Music Education. Suggested activities for educators are provided, as well as key terms and a bibliography. Music Apps for Musicians and Music Teachers is for anyone interested in music, whether hobbyist or professional. It enhances the ability to learn on the go by offering musicians, music students, and music instructors a list of the most useful music apps available.