Digital Music Revised Edition

Today there are talking toasters, cars that start themselves using voice recognition, and telephones that use voice commands. But those are not the only examples of digital sound. The ubiquitous earbuds and tiny MP3 players show how common it is to listen to digital music. Digital Music, Revised Edition examines digital sound's basic principles, history, physics, and different formats and how it became so prevalent in the digital world. Because the Internet has made it so easy to share digital files, this volume includes a discussion of the legal implications of sharing music and other files. This accessible title also considers some of the possible trends in the future of digital music.

Aimed at songwriters, recording artists, and music entrepreneurs, this text explains the basics of digital music law. Entertainment attorney Gordon offers practical tips for online endeavors such as selling song downloads or creating an Internet radio station. Other topics include (for example) web site building, promoting through peer-to-peer networks, etc.

The groundbreaking Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music (Continuum; September 2004; paperback original) maps the aural and discursive terrain of vanguard music today. Rather than offering a history of contemporary music, Audio Culture traces the genealogy of current musical practices and theoretical concerns, drawing lines of connection between recent musical production and earlier moments of sonic experimentation. It aims to foreground the various rewirings of musical composition and performance that have taken place in the past few decades and to provide a critical and theoretical language for this new audio culture. This new and expanded edition of the Audio Culture contains twenty-five additional essays, including four newly-commissioned pieces. Taken as a whole, the book explores the interconnections among such forms as minimalism, indeterminacy, musique concrète, free improvisation, experimental music, avant-rock, dub reggae, ambient music, hip hop, and techno via writings by philosophers, cultural theorists, and composers. Instead of focusing on some "crossover" between "high art" and "popular culture," Audio Culture takes all these musics as experimental practices on par with, and linked to, one another. While cultural studies has tended to look at music (primarily popular music) from a sociological perspective, the concern here is philosophical, musical, and historical. Audio Culture includes writing by some of the most important musical thinkers of the past half-century, among them John Cage, Brian Eno, Ornette Coleman, Pauline Oliveros, Maryanne Amacher, Glenn Gould, Umberto Eco, Jacques Attali, Simon Reynolds, Eliane Radigue, David Toop, John Zorn, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and many others. Each essay has its own short introduction, helping the reader to place the essay within musical, historical, and conceptual contexts, and the volume concludes with a glossary, a timeline, and an extensive discography.

In Fundamentals of Digital Audio, Alan P.Kafauver and David Patschke present a systematic overview of the elements for digital recording and reproducing sound. With Ideas grounded in the principles of acoustics, the authors exptore the essential issues involved in preserving, transferring, and modifying sound recordings in the digital domain. In addition to references on historic methods of sound reproduction, this book includes detailed information about the latest digital audio technology. Of special interest is the coverage of storage media and compression technologies. The authors detail a comprehensive introduction and evolution of data storage and media standards, including CD/DVD/Blu-ray/HD DVD, as well as fully (but plainly) detailing associated digital audio compression algorithms. They catalog in detail the processes involved in digitally editing recorded sound, presenting a step-by-step editing and mastering session. Fundamentals of Digital Audio is an essential textbook for anyone who wants to better understand or work with recorded sound using today's digital equipment. The book contains many diagrams and illustrations through which the authors share their expertise with the reader, Among the few books that treats this subject both comprehensively and understandably, the new edition of Fundamentals of Digital Audio should continue to be an indispensable text in this area.

Electronic and Experimental Music: Technology, Music, and Culture provides a comprehensive history of electronic music, covering key composers, genres, and techniques used in analog and digital synthesis. This textbook has been extensively revised with the needs of students and instructors in mind. The reader-friendly style, logical organization, and pedagogical features of the fifth edition allow easy access to key ideas, milestones, and concepts. New to this edition: • A companion website, featuring key examples of electronic music, both historical and contemporary. • Listening Guides providing a moment-by-moment annotated exploration of key works of electronic music. • A new chapter—Contemporary Practices in Composing Electronic Music. • Updated presentation of classic electronic music in the United Kingdom, Italy, Latin America, and Asia, covering the history of electronic music globally. • An expanded discussion of early experiments with jazz and electronic music, and the roots of electronic rock. • Additional accounts of the vastly under-reported contributions of women composers in the field. • More photos, scores, and illustrations throughout. The companion website features a number of student and instructor resources, such as additional Listening Guides, links to streaming audio examples and online video resources, PowerPoint slides, and interactive quizzes.

Every digital tool, from personal music players to the computers used to land spacecrafts on Mars, is built around the basic principles of the binary number system. In the 17th century, German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz demonstrated that all numbers could be represented using only two digits: 0 and 1. His system allowed scientists to combine the digits to do computations and store information in a way that was simple and easy to interpret. Modern digital systems became possible by converting things like sound waves into the binary system. Digital Research, Revised Edition examines how scientists and researchers have used digital systems to produce some of the tools and gadgets that we use in our everyday lives. It also looks at the effects technology has had on quality of life and how the applications of digital systems have impacted our culture and society by providing new ways of doing things.

Explains how to create, download, upload, play, and remaster MP3 and digital music files; profiles services like Napster, Aimster, and Gnutella; and examines the latest MP3 players.

Electronic music evokes new sensations, feelings, and thoughts in both composers and listeners. Opening the door to an unlimited universe of sound, it engages spatialization as an integral aspect of composition and focuses on sound transformation as a core structural strategy. In this new domain, pitch occurs as a flowing and ephemeral substance that can be bent, modulated, or dissolved into noise. Similarly, time occurs not merely as a fixed duration subdivided by ratios, but as a plastic medium that can be generated, modulated, reversed, warped, scrambled, and granulated. Envelope and waveform undulations on all time scales interweave to generate form. The power of algorithmic methods amplify the capabilities of music technology. Taken together, these constitute game-changing possibilities. This convergence of technical and aesthetic trends prompts the need for a new text focused on the opportunities of a sound oriented, multiscale approach to composition of electronic music. Sound oriented means a practice that takes place in the presence of sound. Multiscale means an approach that takes into account the perceptual and physical reality of multiple, interacting time scales-each of which can be composed. After more than a century of research and development, now is an appropriate moment to step back and reevaluate all that has changed under the ground of artistic practice. Composing Electronic Music outlines a new theory of composition based on the toolkit of electronic music techniques. The theory consists of a framework of concepts and a vocabulary of terms describing musical materials, their transformation, and their organization. Central to this discourse is the notion of narrative structure in composition-how sounds are born, interact, transform, and die. It presents a guidebook: a tour of facts, history, commentary, opinions, and pointers to interesting ideas and new possibilities to consider and explore.