Customer Reviews

Music, Cognition, and Computerized Sound: An Introduction to Psychoacoustics

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Simply a great book to "start" your research. Excellent bibliography, and very very important contributors (those who have made the history of CM). I have bought another couple of books on this subject, however this is the most balanced one. Make sure you read the book by Bregman and Fastl & Zwicker (if your a tech head) once you're finished with this one.

Developed from a series of lectures at the Stanford Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), this book offers a coherent panorama of the field of psychoacoustics as it pertains to music and computerized sound. The authors-among them Max Mathews, Roger Shepard, John Chowning, and John Pierce-are recognized authorities in the field of computer synthesized sound and the nature of acoustical and musical perception. The CD-ROM contains audio samples for each chapter, plus source code for all the samples.

Although it is specifically intended as a course book for psychoacoustics, with a closing chapter on the effective design of experiments and an appendix of exercises, this book should prove valuable to a wide audience. Computers provide what seems the ultimate level of control over sound synthesis, but it is often hard to know where to begin. Anyone who has ever confronted the problem of determining which parameters of a synthesized sound are acoustically perceptible or meaningful will appreciate the clarity with which the introductory chapters distinguish the physical parameters of sound from the perception of sound. Building on established research into the fundamentals of acoustic perception, the book proceeds to more complex issues of voice articulation and synthesis, perceptual streaming, musical memory, and the haptics of sound production. Computer musicians will find material to suggest diverse directions for experimentation. Multimedia artists working with sound will discover new methods for generating sounds, with the potential for weaning themselves from straight playback of sampled sound and working with real time synthesis. Some of the perceptual effects documented in the text and audible on the CD are remarkable in themselves, such as Shepard and Risset tones, or the complex effects of perceptual streaming. The level of detail of many of the chapters is sufficient, particularly when supplemented by the source code, to get you started in a variety of sound synthesis techniques. The brief list of bibliographic references at the end of each chapter will lead you onwards.

While this book is most valuable as a guide to the uses of state-of-the-art technology for acoustic research, it also sheds light on how human cognitive abilities shape musical structures. Choices of rhythm, melodic variation, chord structure, timbre, orchestration, and even the evolution of musical styles over time have some of their reasons in the nature of the human auditory system. A welcome result of reading this book may be that the reader learns to hear natural and musical sounds with a new appreciation of the complex dynamics of sound production, sound perception, and the inner logic of music.

If you are interested in the signal processing end of psychoacoustics, I recommend you read "Signals, Sound, and Sensation" by Hartmann after you finish this book.

This book is great for self-study in psychoacoustics or for reviewing the basics of related fields. One of the best parts is the list of recommended experiments in the back of the book. These really help to keep the information in the respective sections from the realm of abstract pendanticism. This is the book that is assigned to the Psychoacoustics course at CCRMA (Stanford) and is laid out in an easy-to-follow, instructive way. One of the best entry-level texts on the subject.

This book has not had a sufficient editorial vision of the whole book, nor control of the content of the individual chapters. The timbre chapter is among the most incomplete and superficial in existence. This could be said of many entries here.

There is absolutely no doubt these are people of authority, but the whole is far, far less than the sum of the parts.

Most importantly, almost no chapter explains how the entire set of concepts connects specifically to *computerized* sound.

Howard and Angus "Acoustics and Psychoacoustics" is a far more cogently structured, complete, yet introductory, approach to these topics.

Very enjoyable, very entertaining and an interesting reading. The opening chapter by Max Mathews is a lovely opener puts he reader at ease immeadiately. My first book on physco-acoustics and to be honest I am glad. I have read other books on the subject since then but this is still my favourite. Well worth the money.

The book assumes a bit of understanding of DSP: basically, that sound is vibrations and that you can think of it as a sum of many frequencies. The early articles pick up from there, explaining how those vibrations are picked up by the ear, and tries to explain the results we've studied so far on how the brain interprets it. Lots of inspirational bits to spur your own exploration, and there are suggested labs/mini-labs in the back.

If you are interested in the filed of psychoacoustic, this book provides great informations and is written in a easy comprehensible manner. We used that book in my psychoacoustic class at university and even if I was not familiar with this subject, I learned a lot and enjoyed reading it. The book comes with a cd of audio exemples that follows the book.