Active Essays on Computer Music

[Mark Guzdial]

I now have six active essays on computer music up at:

http://swiki.cc.gatech.edu:8080/compMusic/ActiveEssays

These start out with a review of Squeak's computer music tools, then 
go up from acoustics, through basic sound synthesis, how to generate 
a waveform, what makes a timbre, and up to creating a flexible 
oscillator.  I'm going to be working on synthesis methods next, but 
probably not in Active Essay format.  I'll return to Active Essays 
when I write up a tour of Squeak's computer music facilities.

I'd appreciate any comments or critiques of these.  From the 
Squeakland folks, I'd be particularly interested in suggestions for 
more active elements to put in, or other Squeak features I could have 
incorporated that I don't (or maybe don't know about).

These are way different than the Active Essays that others have done 
-- perhaps we don't want to apply that name to these things.  Some of 
the differences include:
- My audience are students who already know Squeak and will be 
programming in Squeak.  So, I don't make any use of tiles, and I show 
lots of code.
- I wrote these to work as lecture slides and student notes.  As 
such, there is less text than a normal essay, there are some things 
unlabelled (e.g., FFTs and waveforms) because I plan to discuss them 
in class, and there are implicit activities for some of these pages 
(e.g., there's active text that brings up a wave editor to play with) 
that I plan to realize in lecture.

Mark
--------------------------
Mark Guzdial : Georgia Tech : College of Computing : Atlanta, GA 30332-0280
Associate Professor - Learning Sciences & Technologies.
Collaborative Software Lab - http://coweb.cc.gatech.edu/csl/
(404) 894-5618 : Fax (404) 894-0673 : guzdial at cc.gatech.edu
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/people/Faculty/Mark.Guzdial.html