Organization

The chapters are generally organized as a series of ``theory'' and ``application'' chapters, working up from delay effects through virtual musical instruments. The purpose of mixing theory and application is to put useful techniques to work soon after they are covered, instead of spending forever in preliminaries before getting to musically interesting applications. Thus, for example, acoustic modeling with delay is followed by artificial reverberation, delay-line interpolation is followed by time-varying delay effects, and so on.

The style of the chapters is relatively concise and bottom-line oriented, with more detailed coverage deferred to the appendices when reasonable. In the Web version, many technical terms are linked to associated tutorials (and this work is ongoing). All software examples in the text are freely available, and perhaps most easily obtained via copy/paste from the Web version.

For class use, the design is approximately one chapter per week, spanning a quarter. There is a significant rise in difficulty level when ``lumped models'' are reached, presumably due to the use of complex impedances in the Laplace and/or domains. Extra time should be allowed to practice problems such as a point-mass colliding with an ideal string (§9.3.1). For a semester course, one could include more material on digitizing differential equations, such as in the appendices regarding finite difference schemes and/or wave digital filters. Alternatively, one could expand the final chapter entitled Virtual Musical Instruments to include more case studies.

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About the Author: Julius Orion Smith III
Julius Smith's background is in electrical engineering (BS Rice 1975, PhD Stanford 1983). He is presently Professor of Music and Associate Professor (by courtesy) of Electrical Engineering at Stanford's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), teaching courses and pursuing research related to signal processing applied to music and audio systems. See http://ccrma.stanford.edu/~jos/ for details.