A Digital Signal Processing Primer: With Applications to Digital Audio and Computer Music [Paperback]

Ken Steiglitz (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0805316841 | ISBN-13: 978-0805316841 | Publication Date: January 15, 1996 | Edition: 1st

This book by Ken Steiglitz is directed to the new market of DSP users brought about by the development of powerful and inexpensive software tools to analyze signals. These new tools allow sophisticated manipulation of signals but do not provide an understanding of the theory or the foundation for the techniques. This easy-to-understand introduction develops an intuitive approach to the development of the mathematics of DSP and uses examples from areas of the spectrum familiar to beginners together with thought provoking questions and suggested experiments.

Editorial Reviews

From the Inside Flap

Using computer technology to store, change, and manufacture sounds and pictures -- digital signal processing -- is one of the most significant achievements of the late twentieth century. This book is an informal, and I hope friendly, introduction to the field, emphasizing digital audio and applications to computer music. It will tell you how DSP works, how to use it, and what the intuition is behind its basic ideas. By keeping the mathematics simple and selecting topics carefully, I hope to reach a broad audience, including:

beginning students of signal processing in engineering and computer science courses; composers of computer music and others who work with digital sound; World Wide Web and internet practitioners, who will be needing DSP more and more for multimedia applications; general readers with a background in science who want an introduction to the key ideas of modern digital signal processing. We'll start with sine waves. They are found everywhere in our world and for a good reason: they arise in the very simplest vibrating physical systems. We'll see, in Chapter 1, that a sine wave can be viewed as a phasor, a point moving in a circle. This representation is used throughout the book, and makes it much easier to understand the frequency response of digital filters, aliasing, and other important frequency-domain concepts. In the second chapter we'll see how sine waves also arise very naturally in more complicated systems -- vibrating strings and organ pipes, for example -- governed by the fundamental wave equation. This leads to the cornerstone of signal processing: the idea that all signals can be expressed as sums of sine waves. From there we take up sampling and the simplest digital filters, then continue to Fourier series, the FFT algorithm, practical spectrum measurement, the z-transform, and the basics of the most useful digital filter design algorithms. The final chapter is a tour of some important applications, including the CD player, FM synthesis, and the phase vocoder. At several points I return to ideas to develop them more fully. For example, the important problem of aliasing is treated first in Chapter 3, then in greater depth in Chapter 11. Similarly, digital filtering is reexamined several times with increasing sophistication. This is why you should read this book from the beginning to the end. Not all books are meant to be read that way, but this one definitely is. Some comments about mechanics: All references to figures and equations refer to the current chapter unless stated otherwise. Absolutely fundamental results are enclosed in boxes. Each chapter ends with a Notes section, which includes historical comments and references to more advanced books and papers, and a set of problems. Read the problems over, even if you don't work them the first time around. They aren't drill exercises, but instead mention generalizations, improvements, and wrinkles you will encounter in practice or in more advanced work. A few problems suggest computer experiments. If you have access to a practical signal-processing laboratory, use it. Hearing is believing. Many people helped me with this book. First I thank my wife Sandy, who supports me in all that I do, and who helped me immeasurably by just being. For his generous help, both tangible and intangible, I am indebted to Paul Lansky, professor of music and composer at Princeton. The course on computer music that we teach together was the original stimulus for this book. I am indebted to many others in many ways. Perry Cook, Julius Smith, Tim Snyder, and Richard Squier read drafts with critical acumen, and their comments significantly improved the result. And I also thank, for assistance of various flavors, Steve Beck, Jack Gelfand, Jim Kaiser, Brian Kernighan, Jim McClellan, Gakushi Nakamura, Matt Norcross, Chris Pirazzi, John Puterbaugh, Jim Roberts, and Dan Wallach. Ken Steiglitz Princeton, N.J.

From the Back Cover

This new book by Ken Steigliz offers an informal and easy-to-understand introduction to digital signal processing, emphasizing digital audio and applications to computer music. A DSP Primer covers important topics such as phasors and tuning forks; the wave equation; sampling and quantizing; feedforward and feedback filters; comb and string filters; periodic sounds; transform methods; and filter design. Steiglitz uses an intuitive and qualitative approach to develop the mathematics critical to understanding DSP.

A DSP Primer is written for a broad audience including:

• Students of DSP in Engineering and Computer Science courses.
• Composers of computer music and those who work with digital sound.
• WWW and Internet developers who work with multimedia.
• General readers interested in science that want an introduction to DSP.

Features:

• Offers a simple and uncluttered step-by-step approach to DSP for first-time users, especially beginners in computer music.
• Designed to provide a working knowledge and understanding of frequency domain methods, including FFT and digital filtering.
• Contains thought-provoking questions and suggested experiments that help the reader to understand and apply DSP theory and techniques.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 300 pages
• Publisher: Prentice Hall; 1st edition (January 15, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805316841
• ISBN-13: 978-0805316841
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.4 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #777,870 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Accessible DSP Text geared for those interested in audio, December 19, 2005

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calvinnme - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Digital Signal Processing Primer: With Applications to Digital Audio and Computer Music (Paperback)

This is a different kind of digital signal processing textbook in just about every way. To begin with, chapter one starts out talking about sinusoids in the context of tuning forks, when just about every other DSP book under the sun starts with a review of linear systems. This is good, in that throughout the book your eye is kept on the ball of actual audio applications. This can be somewhat troublesome in that the author sometimes has to delve into mathematics that the typical DSP student may not be ready for - the wave equation and elementary partial differential equations for example. The author ultimately does get the job done, however, explaining the DFT, FFT, z-transform, and filter design all within the context of audio signals. It is true that only the last chapter is explicitly labeled "Audio and Musical Applications". However, this only means that the author is discussing complex applications in this chapter only, after the groundwork has been laid for all of the theory. I would especially recommend this book to people interested in computer music that need to get up to speed on DSP. Such students may also appreciate "DSP Filter Cookbook" by John Lane. It is all about the implementation of audio filters and contains C++ source code and schematics. If you are a traditional student of DSP and digital audio does not interest you, you might want to go a more traditional route starting out with "Understanding Digital Signal Processing" by Lyon and proceeding on to a more advanced text such as "Discrete Time Signal Processing" by Oppenheimer or "Digital Signal Processing: Principles, Algorithms and Applications" by Proakis.

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great DSP intro w/ good math coverage, October 4, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: A Digital Signal Processing Primer: With Applications to Digital Audio and Computer Music (Paperback)

As a mechanical engineer who is working more and more often with DSP-based control systems, this book served me as a great refresher course. It was perfect for me because it covers all the necessary math, but doesn't get into a lot of nitty-gritty proofs.

I was sort of put off by the subtitle "with Applications to Digital Audio and Computer Music" because I'm more interested in designing DSP-based control systems than music, but I was not disappointed. Everything the author presents is of utility in designing feedback control systems as well (although he doesn't necessarily point this out), and his writing style is extremely engaging and lucid. His enthusiasm actually makes the book fun to read, despite the highly technical subject.

I'm now able to chunk together some pretty cool systems using Matlab, Simulink, and the knowledge I picked up in A Digital Signal Processing Primer.

(Caveat: this book will probably not be of much help to non-engineers or to people who don't much like math. It's *not* a book about how to make cool noises with your computer.)

21 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars good DSP primer, needed more on the audio/music applications, January 4, 2002

By 

wintermute "zero" (right behind you) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Digital Signal Processing Primer: With Applications to Digital Audio and Computer Music (Paperback)

I bought this expecting a thourough primer for audio software development (soft realtime signal generation, filtering, many examples, some code). Nope. Just calculus. It reads very well, it is a great book, but it does not show you how to implement using software or even pseudocode.

For easy fun-to-read coverage on theoretical DSP, and for a small taste of DSP with respect to audio (1 small chapter), this book is five stars.

Since it wasn't what I needed (jeez, who does make a book like what I want anyway? I want to write a modular synth in software, lots of FX, filters, etc..), I give it only 3 stars.. :(