The Craft of Contemporary Commercial Music

Chapter 5

Introduction to Audio and MIDI

As mentioned in the Introduction section of this book, today’s commercial composer needs to be fluent in both music and music technology. In Part Ia, you learned about the fundamentals of music. In Part Ib, you’ll begin to investigate music as sound from an acoustic standpoint, which will in turn allow you to understand the various ways it is captured, translated, and manipulated from an engineering perspective.

Sound

Without the presence of an elastic medium such as air, sound could not exist. At the start of any sound source, air molecules are pushed outward in straight lines in the form of pressure waves. As these waves travel through the ear, three tiny bones in the eardrum vibrate and transmit this ...