Virtual Sound - Sound Synthesis and Signal Processing - Theory and Practice with Csound

Book excerpt: Virtual Sound is an in-depth tutorial in computer music, complete with user-friendly exercises in Csound that illustrate the theory and practice of each type of sound synthesis and processing. The subjects covered include additive synthesis, subtractive synthesis, flow-charts, control signals, vibrato and tremolo, 3-D sound, sampling, analysis and resynthesis, MIDI files and MIDI controls, amplitude and ring modulation, frequency modulation (FM), echo, reverberation, chorus, flanger, phaser, convolution, waveshaping and vector synthesis, granular synthesis, formant synthesis, and physical modeling. If you have a basic understanding of computers and the fundamentals of acoustics, you'll have no trouble reading this book. After having read it, you should be able to use other commercial or research-oriented software with a greater understanding of how it functions.