Customer Reviews

Audio Anecdotes: Tools, Tips, and Techniques for Digital Audio (v. 1)

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Ken Greenebaum, who co-edited this book with Ronen Barzel, and wrote some of the articles, indicates in the preface that his motivation for putting Audio Anecdote together was to get the book he had wished for when he was starting out in digital audio. What he came up with is a wide-ranging collection of 25 articles on various aspects of sound--what it is, how we hear it, how it affects us, how it can be produced and altered, and how it can fool us. Some of the articles are rigorously scientific and technical, while others really are anecdotal and personal. Most significantly there is a wealth of information about the manipulation of sound, and there is some history of the development of our understanding of sound.

Most of the material is aimed at people who have an intense interest in audio, and audio reproduction and development, and who already have some knowledge. However this book also works well for a rank beginner (such as myself). The articles are clear and well-presented with many black and white illustrations, tables, diagrams, and mathematical formulas, not to mention programming code! There is a glossary and there is some overlap in the "anecdotes." For example, after a brief overview of the book, Greenebaum begins with an introductory-like article on what sound is and how we measure it. This is followed by a more technical article by Hesham Fouad entitled "Understanding the Decibel." This in turn is followed by Greenebaum's essay on "Sound Propagation." His exploration of the physics involved is clear and easy to read.

One of the many things that I discovered is that "When we speak on the telephone, a portion of our voice output is intentionally played back to us through the earpiece." Derek DiFilippo and Greenebaum explain in their article, "Perceivable Auditory Latencies" that "If we didn't have a clear sense of hearing ourselves speak, we would tend to talk louder and louder because we [would] assume that the listener on the other end...[wouldn't be able to] hear us either." (pp. 74-75)

I also learned (from Oscar-winning sound director Randy Thom in his article, "Designing a Movie for Sound") that the wise film maker should make his movie with sound in mind pre-production, not as something added on afterward. As Thom points out, in the great cinematic experiences, "the visual and aural elements are working together so well that it is nearly impossible to distinguish them." (p. 406) He mentions the opening of Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979) and the bird attack scene in Hitchcock's The Birds (1963), and the opening of David Fincher's Seven (1995) as examples. And I can't help adding the striking opening sequence from Clint Eastwood's High Plains Drifter (1973) as another preeminent example of how sound can be as important, or even more important, than visuals in making a scene a lasting experience.

Included with the book is a CD that you can listen to with examples of sounds keyed to the discussions in the articles. The effect of latency ("the time between human input to a system...and system output," p. 65) and many other sound phenomena are demonstrated in the most effective way possible--by hearing them.

Special mention might be made of writer Adrienne Ross's personal contribution, "Understanding Hearing Losses and Hearing Gains...," which truly is an anecdote, beautifully written about her discovery of a hearing defect that she had lived with most of her life without realizing it. The fact that she had compensated for the defect by using her other senses, dramatically demonstrates how our experience of sound is not isolated from our other sensual experiences.

This book is a great book for anyone that works with digital audio. Audio Anecdotes introduces us to the practical side of audio. Just take a look at the Table Of Contents to see that there are papers on a wide variety of topics. Each of the 25 papers are written by experts in their respective fields, and each provides practical tips for creating great sounding audio. These tips aren't ideas that are obvious even to those with years of experience in the field- many of them come from years of research. In addition to the tips and techniques, Audio Anecdotes is filled with example code so you can play around and hear exactly what the authors are writing about. The CD-ROM comes with demos and explanations for most of the topics as well as the software to compile and run each demo. The software includes Caliper (a custom, text-based program used for controlling demo parameters), Flavor (a language, based on C++ and Java, great for multimedia applications), Octave (a language similar to MatLab), the PortAudio Library (a C library for audio I/O), and STK (Synthesis Toolkit- a set of C++ classes used for audio synthesis and processing). Whether you're going to use all this software or if you're simply looking for some practical mixing tips, I recommend this book for anyone who wants to learn more about the practical side of digital audio.

Audio Anecdotes: Tools, Tips, And Techniques For Digital Audio is an anthology of essays by a wide variety of expert authors concerning the exciting field of digital audio, lessons that can be learned from its past, discoveries directly applicable in the present, and anticipation of new changes in the future. Cutting-edge, practical, advice-filled instructionals include "Timbre Trees: Integrating Sounds and Images", "RampTest: Quantifying Audio Performance", "Designing a Movie for Sound", "Perceivable Auditory Latencies" and much more. A highly recommended supplementary educational text for anyone pursuing or involved in a career in the digital audio field, Audio Anecdotes is clearly an excellent addition to career-themed professional libraries as well as audio technology and technical reference shelves.

This book brings together articles from all aspects of digital audio from a multitude of authors into one volume. To find the same information you would have to dig through countless journals and troll the web, thus this book's first service is saving time for the researcher. Most books on digital audio focus on one particular audience - the programmer, the signal processing professional, or the recording professional. This book has a variety of articles from all of these fields. Thus it is likely that not every article will be interesting and useful to everyone, but the book should have enough articles of value to make it worthwhile to anyone interested in this fascinating field. The author himself cites Andrew Glassner's "Graphic Gems" series as an inspiration, and you could indeed rename this series "Audio Gems" and not lose any meaning by the retitling.

Of course, there are articles on the basic science of sound that should be of interest to anyone starting out in the field such as "Understanding the Decibel" and "Sound Propagation". Those interested in signal processing and programming of algorithms will enjoy Perry Cook's "Introduction to Physical Modeling" which condenses much of the material in his book "Real Sound Synthesis for Interactive Applications" into one digestible introductory article. Included are some of Cook's programs that assist in physical modeling, but he saves his real contribution to this field, his Synthesis Toolkit in C++, for volume two of this series. Likewise Albert Bregman's extensive research on the subject of auditory scene analysis is condensed nicely in the article "Perceptual Organization of Sound" and acts as an accessible introduction. My personal interest is in synthesis and signal processing, thus from my perspective I found the article "Timbre Trees: Integrating Sounds and Images" to be the most interesting article of the bunch. It explained a fascinating concept I had never heard of before involving an integrated approach to motion and sound. The entire concept is not explained in this one article, but there are references to other sources of information if you want to learn more details. This is the whole purpose of this book and its series - to introduce the reader to a topic in digital audio via a clear article, and then refer the reader to more in depth material outside the scope of the book should you need to know more. I highly recommend this book to anyone involved in the field of digital audio.