Basic Music Technology

Book excerpt: This is an introduction to basic music technology, including acoustics for sound production and analysis, Fourier, frequency modulation, wavelets, and physical modeling and a classification of musical instruments and sound spaces for tuning and counterpoint. The acoustical theory is applied to its implementation in analogue and digital technology, including a detailed discussion of Fast Fourier Transform and MP3 compression. Beyond acoustics, the book discusses important symbolic sound event representation and software as typically realized by MIDI and denotator formalisms. The concluding chapters deal with globalization of music on the Internet, referring to iTunes, Spotify and similar environments. The book will be valuable for students of music, music informatics, and sound engineering.