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Introduction

In the early 1960s a way of efficiently turning sound into bits and bytes was discovered. These analog-to-digital converters, capable of turning one second’s worth of sound into 300,000 numbers (on the fly!) made it possible to transform the acoustic waves that we hear as sound—conversations, car horns, your mother-in-law’s voice and even music—into long sequences of numbers, which were then stored in computer memories.

From there the numbers could then be turned back into the original sound, but this was not a big advance because the ability to simply record a sound had been known for quite some time. The major advance was more than that: Now sound could be manipulated very easily, just as a chunk of data. The creative potential for musical composition and sound generation empowered a revolution in the world of music. That revolution is the world of electroacoustic music, engendered wonderful synthesis of music, mathematics and computing.

This is a complete course that introduces the reader to the mathematical, physical, and computer science challenges and achievements that have made digital audio and electroacoustic music possible.