Electronic Music and Sound Design 3

FOREWORD

by Carmine-Emanuele Cella

Writing a foreword to the third volume of Electronic Music and Sound Design is, in a way, an unnecessary exercise.

The monumental work of Alessandro Cipriani and Maurizio Giri is, de facto, the reference for today’s electronic music production: as such, it really needs no introduction. There is, to my knowledge, no electronic music course in Italy that does not refer to their books. And many foreign educational institutions also use them in some way. I myself, at the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT) at UC Berkeley, often turn to the first two volumes for examples and useful strategies for explaining concepts.

Explaining is, in fact, the fundamental project of the two authors. There is no shortage of books in the world that seek to demonstrate the erudition of their authors. It is harder, however, to find books that focus on the readers – taking them on a journey that will ultimately change them. The books by Cipriani and Giri belong to this rare category: they are books that explain.

With their smooth – yet never trivial – style, the authors guide the readers step by step through complex notions that are broken down into small, easy-to- understand chunks of information. Their approach is encyclopedic: over the course of several volumes, they cover all the key concepts of electronic music. Page after page, the authors lay the foundations of this heterogeneous field, and they do so in a measured and methodical way, calling to mind at times the style of Aristotle.

It is superfluous, therefore, to write a foreword to such a work. But it may be useful for me to try.

Like its predecessors, this third volume follows the tried and tested formula of theory and practice: first a presentation of the concepts involved, and then a demonstration of their practical realization – or as we often say today, their implementation. Although the word “implementation” may sound rather crude and unrefined, it has an important root: it comes from the Latin in-plere, which means to fill in or complete the interior.

Once an abstract concept has been presented, it is filled in, so to speak, with a concrete example: a program in a specific programming language. The language in question is obviously Max, currently considered the state of the art in computer music. But don’t be fooled: the texts of Cipriani and Giri are not limited by their implementations; they will not grow old and end up gathering dust on library shelves. On the contrary, in fact, the implementations they present add new details to the concepts and merge with them. This is one of the book’s strong points, in my opinion.

Returning to the Aristotelian metaphor, the formal coupling of theory and practice is somewhat reminiscent of the division between Metaphysics and Physics — a division which is, in fact, purely imaginary. In reality, everything finally blends into a conceptual unity that encompasses the understanding of the object of study.

The concepts presented in this third volume are authentic, important and always of great interest to those who care about this field. They include sound spatialization, nonlinear synthesis, granular synthesis and a topic that is of particular interest to me, transformations in the frequency domain.

In a sense, the motif unifying all the chapters is representation. This term has a precise meaning from a mathematical point of view. Representing a signal means projecting it into a space in which some specific properties are highlighted. The projection is created by calculating the scalar product between the original signal and an appropriate set of functions known as the kernel. The quintessential representation is that of Fourier, in which the kernel consists of a set of sine waves and in which the frequency of the signals is the highlighted aspect (Chapter 13). However, it is possible to generalize this type of representation using any type of kernel. For instance, another important representation is the one in which both time and frequency are made explicit using a kernel consisting of sine waves that have a specific duration. This representation – known as that of Gabor – is the foundation of both granular synthesis and the micro-temporal approach to signal processing (Chapter 12). When the projection is made with kernels that exhibit other more specific properties, we may speak of modulation and nonlinear distortion (Chapter 11). In addition, Chapter 10 deals with spatialization. For the first time ever, all the algorithmic techniques for reverberation are grouped together and united by a single programming style. It is thereby possible to work out why Schroeder’s algorithm sounds bad or why feedback delay networks are difficult to manage. I personally do not think one can do better than this pedagogically. Finally, as in a musical form, the book is enriched by Interludes. In these interludes, the authors reveal the key elements of Gen (a language internal to Max, useful for building more efficient algorithms) and Jitter (the subset of functions supporting video and matrix processing).

The book is accompanied by a collection of digital supporting materials, including patches and sound examples. The latter are of paramount importance for an understanding of the concepts introduced, particularly the more advanced concepts based on the Fourier transform (Chapter 13). By simply listening, one can come to understand the difference between bin shifting and spectral LFOs, or between spectral freeze and spectral warping. Creating good sound examples is a fine art, and in this area as well the authors succeed in being both effective and compelling.

In conclusion, the third volume of Electronic Music and Sound Design is a kaleidoscopic catalog of ideas and applications for analyzing, synthesizing, and transforming signals in a wide variety of ways.
It makes an important effort in the contemporary world, filling the pedagogical void created by the lack of books that explain. Anyone who has taught electronic music of any sort is aware of the heterogeneity of the discipline’s typical audience: composers, DJs, sound designers, media artists. When faced with such diversity, it is difficult to communicate with everyone without becoming superficial. Cipriani and Giri succeed in addressing everyone without weakening the theoretical basis and without unnecessary specializations – achieving a masterful balance of comprehensibility, functionality, and breadth.

To use an expression from the United States, I would say that this work is larger than life. And quite frankly, it’s just what we needed.

Carmine-Emanuele Cella
Assistant professor in Music and Technology
Center for New Music and Audio Technology (CNMAT) University of California, Berkeley