An Introduction to the Creation of Electroacoustic Music

Rating:
Summary: Sam is funny in class...
Review: It's good that Sam has written down so many of his ideas, becuase he could never remember them if he didn't. I found this book was good. for reading.

Rating:
Summary: Sam is funny in class...
Review: It's good that Sam has written down so many of his ideas, becuase he could never remember them if he didn't. I found this book was good. for reading.

Rating:
Summary: Everything you need for starting your own research
Review: This book covers everything you need to know about Music and new technologies field. From physics of sound to complex MIDI network technology and it ends with perfect chapter of Audience in Electroacoustical Music. There are also etudes (excercises) which makes you practise what you have learned.
The only chapter I don't like was the "Composing Electroacoustic Music", which is really not enough for people who really intend to compose serious music. First he starts with the basics of music and on the next page you see 12-tone row and advanced 20th century compositional techniques. There are no Beethoven, Debussy etc. that made a lot for Schoenberg's 12-tone system. But there are other books that will teach you that.
Even if most of the text is out of date, it's one of Introductional books to this field of music.
I believe it is a School Book in the university in US where mr. Pellman teaches.
At the end... even my 50 years old father understood the text in the book. It's very well written and understandable for the most uneducated newcomers.

Rating:
Summary: a decent introduction to electroacoustic music
Review: this book has some very good aspects and some not-so-good ones; mainly, the chapters on computer music and MIDI production are swiftly going out of date, and there is no way to keep it updated without yearly appendices to the text itself. the book covers analog tape recording and splicing in good detail, especially for someone trying to do it on his/her own with no official teaching of it. pellman's listening guides are excellent as well.

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Summary: The Basic Text with an Advanced Price
Review: With the Electroacoustic Music (EAM) field continuing to take hold in the popular sectors of consumerist American society, it is not surprising to see a growth of instructional manuals, DIY tomes, and textbooks surfacing. For most purposes, Pellman's reduced text stands out as being rather accessible, if not downright cogent, as a primer for the EAM genre in terms of explicating digital sound basics, acoustical properties basics, and elementary compositional methods.

The section of the book speaking about MIDI is outstanding. Pellman's accurate reproduction of the MIDI 1.0 Specifications through a rudimentary lens is the best portion of this text as he guides readers through the ins and outs of operational messages, control and data functions, and practical applications. Also, the chapters on MIDI are well-appointed with diagrams and photographs aplenty, leaving little doubt in the mind of the reader about which his generally clear text speaks.

Not all of this book is as eye-pleasing, easy-to-follow, or even up-to-date as it should be, however. While historically important to do so, Pellman spends far too much time on working with magnetic tape. There are very few institutions still working with magnetic tape, and for the casual or amateur music maker, an Otari 4-channel reel-to-reel is conspicuously absent from his or her studio, making home or casual usage of these chapters worthless. Pellman should keep the historical aspects here and make a cursory overview of how tape was manipulated, but leave well-enough alone after a small hat-tip.

From a pedagogical standpoint, there are two rather serious issues that surface. Primarily, Pellman attempts to instruct compositional approaches to EAM through using serial (dodecaphonic) rows. This is a nasty snafu on the author's part largely because this will subconsciously say to students that "everything you do in this field has pitch." Not so at all. Also, for those people who use this text and cannot read music (or could care less about Schoenberg), these lessons (along with the quick and painful "here's a grand staff, now read music" page) will be largely lost. In terms of continuity and placement, should Pellman want to retain these lessons, they should come much later in the work - after all: the book's implicit intentions are to introduce the fundamentals and concepts, not necessarily compositional approaches. The second issue is the seeming confusion (from my students, that is) that arises during discussions of modular synthesis. Here, Pellman speaks loudly about VCOs, VCAs, VCFs, et. al., and peppers the discussion with topics and terms that should also be used in tandem with discussing modes of digital synthesis and reproduction but never mentions them again outside of the chapter dealing with analog synthesis. Frankly, the chapter on analog synthesis and modular synthesis is far too long without discussing much of their applications to digital machines and media.

From a purely aesthetic point of view, many of the photographs and illustrations are a bit too dark or poorly contrasted (all internal images are in black and white), making it difficult, in some cases, to stare an inharmonic spectrum down the barrel without squinting. For as much as the publisher is asking people to pay for this book, they could include at least a few token color images (especially when dealing with things like waveforms viewed in an editor or pictures of spectrographs and sonographs).

Anymore, most of the basics of digital music and EAM can be found online or in other texts. There are certainly more cost-effective solutions to satisfy the aural appetite, as well. But, for absolute beginners who want a solid grounding in MIDI, get confused by serial composition and fuzzy images, and are willing to pay nearly one hundred dollars for something worth perhaps half that amount, this book is right up their alley.