(Part 2) Best midi & mixers books according to redditors

I have some books on procedurally generating music.

• Virtual Music: David Cope
  
• Computer Models of Musical Creativity: David Cope
  
• The Computer Music Tutorial: Curtis Roads
  
  Not specific to video games, but more about computer generated music in general (or in theory if you prefer). David Cope is a pioneer of this stuff and Curtis Roads book is basically the bible of computer sound.
  
  Cool stuff - if you get something serious going I'd take a peak. Haven't invested as much time in this stuff as I would like to.
  
  Also - have a look at CSound

Well anything that falls under "cross-cultural" usually winds up with the ethnomusicologists.

You sound like you'd be more interested in the music cognition side of music theory (not my area at all). Again, Music Perception is going to be your best bet here. You might also check out David Huron's book, Sweet Anticipation, which deals with anticipation in music from a psychological perspective. Juslin and Sloboda's Handbook of Music and Emotion has a lot of the cognitive side of things as well, if you're interested in that aspect. Finally, David Temperley's Cognition of Basic Musical Structures or Justin London's Hearing in Time might be worth a look.

Just basic synthesizer stuff with AVRs.

Making a "proper" synthesizer from scratch is a fairly big job. Most people would probably recommend using csound as the fundamental building blocks.

I recently read through the book basicSynth, and this is the website: http://basicsynth.com/

It explains audio synthesis from zero to a full-blown synthesizer. It's a good read, even if you know some of it.

To run csound, you'd need something that runs Linux. e.g. a Raspberry Pi would be perfect.

To make interesting sounds, you don't need much processing. To make large and complex sounds, you do need a bit more processing but it's mainly for running several voices at once.

Do you know DDS? Direct Digital Synthesis?

You have a "phase accumulator". e.g. 32bit integer.

Every sample you add (or subtract) a value (Frequency Word) to the phase accumulator.

Every sample you take the top half (MSBits) of the phase accumulator, this becomes the lookup address into your wavetable (e.g. sine, square, triangle, random), the value at the wavetable is output to the DAC.

Vary the Frequency Word and you vary the frequency of the waveform.

This consumes about 10 instructions on most CPUs. That's your basic oscillator.

while(1)
{
outputsample = DDS_sin(440); // 440Hz sine wave generator
DAC(outputsample);
delay(sample_period);
}

Take two DDS blocks, and use one to modulate the other. You've got a basic FM synthesizer.

while(1)
{
outputsample = DDS_sin1(DDS_square(10) + 440); // 440Hz sine wave modulated with 10Hz square wave
DAC(outputsample);
delay(sample_period);
}


You can also add envelope modulation (Amplitude Modulation) to the output of your DDS blocks.

while(1)
{
outputsample = DDS_envelope() * DDS_sin1(DDS_sin2(10) + 440); // 440Hz modulated with 10Hz
DAC(outputsample);
delay(sample_period);
}

I have! It is the book you need, it is sure!

https://www.amazon.com/Foundations-Music-Technology-V-Manzo/dp/0199368295

You have very different goals than I have. My goal when giving advice is to get people something so they can make music. I am not interested in wasting my time with your Reddit drama — someone starting out does not have that clear of and idea what gear best fits the music they will make, simply because they haven’t made music yet. Once they have gear, and once they start learning scales and chords — one good book which I used when starting out is The synthesizer and electronic keyboard handbook, which shows all the types of chords and scales, as well as a good overview of analog synths and the keyboards which preceded analog polys — then they can figure out what direction they want their music to go. Anyway, as you have pointed out multiple times, if they don’t like the gear they have bought, they can always “flip it” (sell it and buy other gear).

OP - this poster has been told by a moderator that “You personally are 70% of the reason rule number 1 had to be created. You are eventually going to be voted off the island if you can't figure out a way to keep this childish garbage out of here” and I’m sorry you had to waste your time reading his drama queen whiny posting.