Cycling ’74 has published Generating Sound & Organizing Time – Thinking with gen~, the first of a two-volume series on digital audio signal processing and synthesis.

Generating Sound and Organizing Time, by Graham Wakefield and Gregory Taylor, is a 380-page book that comes with a downloadable collection of Gen patches. eaders can crack open the algorithms of oscillators, filters, audio effects and so on that are inaccessibly black-boxed in most music software, and explore creating their own variations, through experimentation and hybridization.

This book is also about developing useful things to think with: design patterns, techniques and subcircuits, to help you bring new musical signal processes to life.

“This book unlocks—for composers, musicians, sound designers, and experimentalists at every level—a very smart exploration and demystification of computer music techniques, and a beautifully concise, unpretentious and accessible introduction to low-level signal processing,” says R. Luke DuBois, Associate Professor of Integrated Design & Media at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering. “Graham and Gregory’s book will not only give you insight into how to work with audio all the way down to its elemental sample-by-sample number streams; it will also inspire you to want to work this way all the time.”

The book covers a wide range of applications:

• algorithmic rhythm generators, beat slicers, Euclidean sequencers;
• morphing LFOs, wave shapers, bit-crushers and gliding quantizers;
• chaotic systems, stepped and smoothed noise and chance operations;
• a wide palette of filters and delay effects;
• phase and frequency modulation algorithms;
• formant, pulsar and polyphonic granular synthesizers of various kinds;
• bandlimited virtual analog and wavetable oscillators capable of intensive modulation and more.

Pricing and Availability:

Generating Sound & Organizing Time is available now through Amazon for $37.00.  A Kindle version is also in the works and is expected to be priced at $19.95.