Let us consider the contents of this book and the reasons for including each topic.

A number of  basic technologies have been developed by specialists over the last thirty years of the twentieth century. These technologies have their roots in an exciting amalgam of:

• telecommunication systems
• computer technology
• human factors (in the form of ‘Human Computer Interaction’ -HCI )
• audio

all embedded within sound processing and musical contexts. This sets the framework for the book.

We wish to provide enough information so that students and the dedicated layman can understand the nature, synthesis and transformation of sound which form the basis of digital sound processing for music and multimedia.

We  provide enough background in computer techniques so that you, the reader, can write computer ‘algorithms’ (programs) to realise new processes central to your own musical and sound processing ideas.

• This includes material on the structure of computer systems themselves (the ‘hardware’) so that you may also be able to understand how these algorithms will produce sound, as they run in the computers or on specialised sound processing units installed within the computer.

• It also includes use of the MIDI standard, as well as the direct synthesis of sound.

• Finally we include material to enable you to understand the nature of the way in which people interact with electronic instruments, so that you can ultimately contribute to the development of new kinds of performance and composition systems.

Much ground has to be covered to provide all of the material necessary to achieve these objectives fully, and this probably represents a lifetime of study! It is certainly beyond the scope of any one book to cover the whole field. There are plenty of texts which deal with the detail of the necessary techniques used in sound processing systems. However, many of them are quite inaccessible for the newcomer to the subject, and are often inappropriately structured for the purposes of an understanding of practical systems.

The purpose of this book therefore is to provide a key to the material in these texts, so that you can approach them with the confidence that you have a firm, non superficial understanding of the fundamental concepts which underpin the subject.