Robin Whittle wrote:

> Does anyone have more information about cmusic?

As someone else pointed out, F. Richard Moore's "Elements of Computer Music" is THE place to go for
cmusic info, although I am not sure if cmusic is an active language at this point. It is also pretty
good in describing the internals of computer music languages - it has good descriptions of the
workings of table-lookup oscillators, comb filters, Karplus-Strong, and other cool things, as well
as extensive C code and descriptions of phase vocoding and LPC. However, it skimps on some basic
items; for example, even though it gets into some of the theory of digital filtering, it doesn't
give any useful C code examples for basic building blocks such as reson, or any of the commonly used
digital filters (on the other hand, I did figure out how to code allpass filters from this book).

Going off on a little tangent here, what computer music books have been most useful to people on
this list? As a way of distracting myself from the fact that my car was stolen last night, here is a
list of books that have helped me:

- Computer Music, Charles Dodge and Thomas A. Jerse, both 1st and 2nd editions. The 2nd edition was
the textbook for my computer music classes at the University of Washington, and is excellent in that
role - the sequence followed in introducing concepts is very logical and easy to follow for someone
new to computer music. The 1st edition, from 1985, leaves out the descriptions of more modern
techniques such as phase vocoding, physical modeling, and granular synthesis, but makes up for it
with the inclusion of FORTRAN code for almost all of the "classic" unit generators (based on Music
4BF). The code in Computer Music is much easier to follow than the Csound source code - if you want
to know how one of the older Csound ugens works, having this book around helps a great deal.

- The Technology of Computer Music, by Max V. Mathews et al. A 1969 textbook, that is still
amazingly useful today. No code per se, but excellent in-depth descriptions of the internals of unit
generators that serves as a nice compliment to the code examples in the 1st edition of Dodge &
Jerse. 

- Musical Applications of Microprocessors, by Hal Chamberlin. An excellent book that has helped me
bridge the gap between analog synthesis and computer music. Code examples, schematics, in-depth
descriptions that don't require engineering-level math - this book has got it all. Not as useful for
understanding Music N-languages as the previous two books, but very useful for a broad perspective
of the field.

There have been lots of other books that have been useful to me (Foundations of Computer Music,
Representations of Musical Signals, various issues of Electronotes) but the above books have been
the most helpful in the past few months, at least with regards to writing Csound unit generators.
Unfortunately, they are all out of print, but copies turn up on a regular basis - Powell's Technical
Bookstore in Portland, Oregon is a good place to look for this type of stuff.

Sean Costello

P.S. Robin, when is the DevilFish unit generator coming out? :)  I'd love to have a digital
simulation of an overdriven diode ladder filter available in Csound, with the output being used to
FM the cutoff...

dupswapdrop: the music-dsp mailing list and website
http://shoko.calarts.edu/~glmrboy/musicdsp/music-dsp.html