The Musical Art Of Synthesis

New synths with unique features and layers of complexity are released frequently, with hundreds of different synths currently available in the marketplace. How do you know which ones to use and how do you get the most out of the ones you already own? The Musical Art of Synthesis presents synthesizer programming with a specific focus on synthesis as a musical tool. Through its innovative design, this title offers an applied approach by providing a breakdown of synthesis methods by type, the inclusion of step-by-step patch recipes, and extensive web-based media content including tutorials, demonstrations, and additional background information. Sam McGuire and Nathan van der Rest guide you to master synthesis and transcend the technical aspects as a musician and artist. Synths are presented using a multi-tiered system beginning with basic instructions for all common synth techniques. Historical information is included for each type of synth, which is designed to help you understand how each instrument relates to the bigger picture. Advanced level instruction focuses on modern implementations and on mobile devices, with special focus on performing and practical usage. The goal The Musical Art of Synthesis is to bring all of the different types of together in the same discussion and encourage you to see the similarities and differences that force you to gain a better overall understanding of the synthesis process. Key features of this title: • This book will teach you how to put synthesizers to use with easy-to-use synth patch recipes • Using a unique, multi-tiered approach applicable to the level of equipment in use, this publication introduces concepts that apply to a wide range of hardware/software synthesizers. • A robust companion website, featuring video demonstrations by synthesizer experts, further supports the book: www.focalpress.com/cw/mcguire

New synths with unique features and layers of complexity are released frequently, with hundreds of different synths currently available in the marketplace. How do you know which ones to use and how do you get the most out of the ones you already own? The Musical Art of Synthesis presents synthesizer programming with a specific focus on synthesis as a musical tool. Through its innovative design, this title offers an applied approach by providing a breakdown of synthesis methods by type, the inclusion of step-by-step patch recipes, and extensive web-based media content including tutorials, demonstrations, and additional background information. Sam McGuire and Nathan van der Rest guide you to master synthesis and transcend the technical aspects as a musician and artist. Synths are presented using a multi-tiered system beginning with basic instructions for all common synth techniques. Historical information is included for each type of synth, which is designed to help you understand how each instrument relates to the bigger picture. Advanced level instruction focuses on modern implementations and on mobile devices, with special focus on performing and practical usage. The goal The Musical Art of Synthesis is to bring all of the different types of together in the same discussion and encourage you to see the similarities and differences that force you to gain a better overall understanding of the synthesis process. Key features of this title: • This book will teach you how to put synthesizers to use with easy-to-use synth patch recipes • Using a unique, multi-tiered approach applicable to the level of equipment in use, this publication introduces concepts that apply to a wide range of hardware/software synthesizers. • A robust companion website, featuring video demonstrations by synthesizer experts, further supports the book: www.focalpress.com/cw/mcguire

An anthology of pioneer sound artist Mark Fell's work charting his defiantly unorthodox thinking on time, structure, technology, and the relation between academic and popular electronic music. In this extensive anthology, Mark Fell, a pioneering artist known for his sound installations and his musical work solo and as part of SND and Sensate Focus, assembles a collection of diverse materials charting his defiantly unorthodox thinking on time, structure, technology, and the relation between academic and popular electronic music. An amalgam of workbook and manifesto, featuring a collection of interleaved statements, diagrammatic scores, and instructional texts, Structure and Synthesis is a direct engagement with Fell's original thinking and his continual provocations in regard to "experimental" music. Alongside reflections on theory and practice, the volume includes exercises for dismantling musical expertise, habits, and intuitions, documenting Fell's explorations of the peripheries of rhythm, shape, and time in perception and performance. Long-term collaborator designer Joe Gilmore provides a striking graphic context for Fell's evolving thinking and the methods and structures he has developed through his solo and collaborative work.

How to create a genuine synthesis of the component elements in a musical drama: this was the central problem of Wagner's life as a theorist and as a creative artist. This is the first book which focuses attention exclusively on this problem. It extracts from Wagner's voluminous and far-ranging writings the pertinent theories on synthesis, analyzes them, and shows how the creative works reflect the successive stages of these theories. The author does not attempt to establish priority of influence for either theory or practice, but shows that they are necessarily complementary and reciprocal aspects of Wagner's creative activity, and that a precise analysis of the theory will cast new light on the nature of the musical dramas. Wagner thought consistently in terms of a union of poetry, music, and drama, but the manner in which he described and justified their union, as well as the way in which he combined them in his works, varied considerably in the successive periods of his life. In particular, his acceptance of Schopenhauer's esthetics of music in 1854, shortly after he had worked out a complete theory of art synthesis in Opera and Drama, his major essay, was an important turning point. For Schopenhauer's views were incompatible with that theory, and the result was a series of adjustments by Wagner in both theory and practice, in which he attempted to reconcile his ideas with those of Schopenhauer. The author's careful analysis of these successive stages--his discussion of the poetry, drama, and music, not as separate elements, but only in their relation to their function as part of a synthesis--is an absolutely new contribution to Wagner research. The author presents the theory and the works, particularly from The Rhinegold on, in an important new perspective. --Jacket

This book contains a complete and accurate mathematical treatment of the sounds of music with an emphasis on musical timbre. The book spans the range from tutorial introduction to advanced research and application to speculative assessment of its various techniques. All the contributors use a generalized additive sine wave model for describing musical timbre which gives a conceptual unity, but is of sufficient utility to be adapted to many different tasks.

Cloud-Based Music Production: Samples, Synthesis, and Hip-Hop presents a discussion on cloud-based music-making procedures and the musical competencies required to make hip-hop beats. By investigating how hip-hop producers make music using cloud-based music production libraries, this book reveals how those services impact music production en masse. Cloud-Based Music Production takes the reader through the creation of hip-hop beats from start to finish – from selecting samples and synthesizer presets to foundational mixing practices – and includes analysis and discussion of how various samples and synthesizers work together within an arrangement. Through case studies and online audio examples, Shelvock explains how music producers directly modify the sonic characteristics of hip-hop sounds to suit their tastes and elucidates the psychoacoustic and perceptual impact of these aesthetically nuanced music production tasks. Cloud-Based Music Production will be of interest to musicians, producers, mixers and engineers and also provides essential supplementary reading for music technology courses.

Virtual Music is about artificial creativity. Focusing on the author's Experiments in Musical Intelligence computer music composing program, the author and a distinguished group of experts discuss many of the issues surrounding the program, including artificial intelligence, music cognition, and aesthetics. The book is divided into four parts. The first part provides a historical background to Experiments in Musical Intelligence, including examples of historical antecedents, followed by an overview of the program by Douglas Hofstadter. The second part follows the composition of an Experiments in Musical Intelligence work, from the creation of a database to the completion of a new work in the style of Mozart. It includes, in sophisticated lay terms, relatively detailed explanations of how each step in the process contributes to the final composition. The third part consists of perspectives and analyses by Jonathan Berger, Daniel Dennett, Bernard Greenberg, Douglas R. Hofstadter, Steve Larson, and Eleanor Selfridge-Field. The fourth part presents the author's responses to these commentaries, as well as his thoughts on the implications of artificial creativity. The book (and corresponding Web site) includes an appendix providing extended musical examples referred to and discussed in the book, including composers such as Scarlatti, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Puccini, Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, Debussy, Bartok, and others. It is also accompanied by a CD containing performances of the music in the text.

Opening with an account of print portraiture facilitating Franz Liszt's celebrity status and concluding with Riot Grrrl's noisy politics of feminism and performance, this interdisciplinary anthology charts the relationship between music and the visual arts from late Romanticism and the birth of modernism to 'postmodernism', while crossing from Western art to the Middle East. Focused on music as a central experience of art and life, these essays scrutinize 'the musicalisation of art' focusing on the visual and performing arts and detailing significant instances of intra-art relations between c. 1840 and the present day. Essays reflect on the aesthetic relationships of music to painting, performance and installation, sound-and- silence, time-and-space. The insistent influence of Wagner is considered as well as the work and ideas of Manet, Satie and Cage, Thomas Wilfred, La Monte Young and Eliasson. What distinguishes these studies are the convictions that music is never alone and that a full understanding of the “isms” of the last two hundred years is best achieved when music's influential presence in the visual arts is acknowledged and interrogated.