Product Description

How hearing works and how the brain processes sounds entering the ear to provide the listener with useful information are of great interest to psychologists, cognitive scientists, and musicians. However, while a number of books have concentrated on individual aspects of this field, known as psychoacoustics, there has been no comprehensive introductory coverage of the multiple topics encompassed under the term. Music, Cognition, and Computerized Sound is the first book to provide that coverage. The book begins with introductory chapters on the basic physiology and functions of the ear and auditory sections of the brain, then proceeds to discuss numerous topics associated with the study of psychoacoustics, including cognitive psychology and the physics of sound. The book has a particular emphasis on music and computerized sound. An accompanying CD-ROM includes many sound examples to help explicate the text.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #607867 in Books
• Published on: 2001-03-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

Review
"The book can be highly recommended for instructors who are teaching a course on musical acoustics or music perception. The book contains a number of insightful observations, especially on scales, tonality, and the pitches of complex tones. The chapters on the human voice, memory, and haptics by the junior authors seemed particularly fresh and interesting." - William M. Hartmann, Music Perception"

About the Author
Perry R. Cook is Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Princeton University, with a joint appointment in Music.

Customer Reviews

A great place to start.
Simply a great book to "start" your research. Excellent bibliography, and very very important contributors (those who have made the history of CM). I have bought another couple of books on this subject, however this is the most balanced one. Make sure you read the book by Bregman and Fastl & Zwicker (if your a tech head) once you're finished with this one.

Great intro to the subjective human perception of sound
Developed from a series of lectures at the Stanford Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), this book offers a coherent panorama of the field of psychoacoustics as it pertains to music and computerized sound. The authors-among them Max Mathews, Roger Shepard, John Chowning, and John Pierce-are recognized authorities in the field of computer synthesized sound and the nature of acoustical and musical perception. The CD-ROM contains audio samples for each chapter, plus source code for all the samples.

Although it is specifically intended as a course book for psychoacoustics, with a closing chapter on the effective design of experiments and an appendix of exercises, this book should prove valuable to a wide audience. Computers provide what seems the ultimate level of control over sound synthesis, but it is often hard to know where to begin. Anyone who has ever confronted the problem of determining which parameters of a synthesized sound are acoustically perceptible or meaningful will appreciate the clarity with which the introductory chapters distinguish the physical parameters of sound from the perception of sound. Building on established research into the fundamentals of acoustic perception, the book proceeds to more complex issues of voice articulation and synthesis, perceptual streaming, musical memory, and the haptics of sound production. Computer musicians will find material to suggest diverse directions for experimentation. Multimedia artists working with sound will discover new methods for generating sounds, with the potential for weaning themselves from straight playback of sampled sound and working with real time synthesis. Some of the perceptual effects documented in the text and audible on the CD are remarkable in themselves, such as Shepard and Risset tones, or the complex effects of perceptual streaming. The level of detail of many of the chapters is sufficient, particularly when supplemented by the source code, to get you started in a variety of sound synthesis techniques. The brief list of bibliographic references at the end of each chapter will lead you onwards.

While this book is most valuable as a guide to the uses of state-of-the-art technology for acoustic research, it also sheds light on how human cognitive abilities shape musical structures. Choices of rhythm, melodic variation, chord structure, timbre, orchestration, and even the evolution of musical styles over time have some of their reasons in the nature of the human auditory system. A welcome result of reading this book may be that the reader learns to hear natural and musical sounds with a new appreciation of the complex dynamics of sound production, sound perception, and the inner logic of music.

If you are interested in the signal processing end of psychoacoustics, I recommend you read "Signals, Sound, and Sensation" by Hartmann after you finish this book.

Superficial and dangerously incomplete
This book has not had a sufficient editorial vision of the whole book, nor control of the content of the individual chapters. The timbre chapter is among the most incomplete and superficial in existence. This could be said of many entries here.

There is absolutely no doubt these are people of authority, but the whole is far, far less than the sum of the parts.

Most importantly, almost no chapter explains how the entire set of concepts connects specifically to *computerized* sound.

Howard and Angus "Acoustics and Psychoacoustics" is a far more cogently structured, complete, yet introductory, approach to these topics.