Signal Processing Aspects of Computer Music--A Survey

The application of modern digital signal processing techniques to the production and processing of musical sound gives the composer and musician a level of freedom and precision of control never before obtainable. This paper surveys the use of analysis of natural sounds for synthesis, the use of speech and vocoder techniques, methods of artificial reverberation, the use of discrete summation formulae for highly efficient synthesis, the concept of the all-digital recording studio, and discusses the role of special-purpose hardware in digital music synthesis, illustrated with two unique digital music synthesizers.