Representations of Musical Signals describes a new generation of digital audio and computer music systems made possible by recent advances in digital signal processing theory, hardware design, and programming techniques. It explores new representations of musical signals that can have profound effects on the way musicians conceive of and realize musical ideas. In particular, the book focuses on models that combine time-domain and frequency-domain representations (grains, wavelets, and physical models), visual programming and advanced user interfaces, and that incorporate musical knowledge using artificial intelligence techniques and adaptive neural networks.
The 14 contributions take up issues of how musical signals should be displayed to musicians, engineers, and scientists who want to work with them, how professionals can work with the representations to accomplish musical tasks, how systems can be designed to permit working with multiple views of the same signal, and how representations of musical signals should be organized to promote efficient communication between devices using these signals.
Contributors: J. M. Adrien. D. Arfib. R. D'Autilia. C. Cadoz. S. Cavaliere. G. De Poli, G. Evangelista. J. Florens. G. Garnett. A. Grossman. F. Guerra. K. Hebei. R. Kronland-Martinet. C. Lischka. A. Piccialli. J-C. Risset. C. Roads. C. Scaletti., J. Sundberg.
Giovanni De Poli is a member of the faculty of the Department of Informatics and Electronics at the University of Padua.
Aldo Piccialli is a member of the faculty of the Department of Physics at the University of Naples.
Curtis Roads is Associate Professor of Media Arts and Technology, with a joint appointment in the Department of Music, at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Curtis Roads (b. 1951) holds a joint appointment as Professor and Chairman of the Department of Media Arts and Technology (MAT) and in Music at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), where he is also Associate Director of the Center for Research in Electronic Art Technology (CREATE). He studied music composition and computer programming at California Institute of the Arts, the University of California, San Diego (BA Summa Cum Laude with Highest Departmental Honors), and the University of Paris VIII (PhD Très honorable avec félicitations). From 1980 to 1986 he was a researcher in computer music at the MIT Media Laboratory. He then taught at the Federico II University of Naples, Harvard University, Oberlin Conservatory, CCMIX (Paris), and the University of Paris 8. He has led masterclasses at the Australian National Conservatory (Melbourne), Prometeo Laboratorio (Parma), Ionian University (Corfu), Goethe Institute (Rome), Kunitachi College of Music (Tokyo), Royal Conservatory (Aarhus), Catholic University (Porto), and the Zürich University of the Arts, among others. He is co-organizer of international workshops on musical signal processing in Sorrento, Capri, and Santa Barbara (1988, 1991, 1997, 2000). He served on the composition juries of the Ars Electronica (Linz) and the International Electroacoustic Music Competition (Bourges, France). Certain of his compositions feature granular and pulsar synthesis, methods he developed for generating sound from acoustical particles. A cofounder of the International Computer Music Association in 1979, he was Editor of Computer Music Journal (The MIT Press) from 1978 to 1989, and Associate Editor 1990-2000. His books include Foundations of Computer Music (1985, The MIT Press), Composers and the Computer (1985, AR Editions), The Music Machine (1989, The MIT Press), Representations of Musical Signals (1991, The MIT Press), The Computer Music Tutorial (1996, The MIT Press), Musical Signal Processing (co-editor, 1997, Routledge), L'audionumerique (1998, Dunod), The Computer Music Tutorial - Japanese edition (2000, Denki Daigaku Shuppan) and Microsound (2002, The MIT Press), which explores the aesthetics and techniques of composition with sound particles. A revised edition of L'audionumerique was published in 2007. A Chinese version of The Computer Music Tutorial is scheduled for publication in 2010 as a national textbook. His music is available on compact discs produced by Asphodel, MODE, OR, the MIT Media Laboratory, and Wergo. His composition Clang-Tint (1994) was commissioned by the Japan Ministry of Culture (Bunka-cho). His electronic music collection POINT LINE CLOUD won the Award of Distinction at the 2002 Ars Electronica and was released as a CD + DVD on the Asphodel label (San Francisco) in 2005. In 2007 he received a National Science Foundation grant for research in algorithms for sound analysis (dictionary-based pursuit). He is currently completing a new book Composing Electronic Music: A New Aesthetic for Oxford University Press, a revised edition of The Computer Music Tutorial for The MIT Press, and a new set of electronic music entitled FLICKER TONE PULSE.
