I am by no means an expert in this topic: as a result there are no doubt numerous errors in the text, ranging from simple typos to profound misunderstandings. I would appreciate feedback, corrections, and proposed additions: I will be gradually making improvements and fixes to the text.

Name Email (I will not abuse this) Using this mostly as a Professional Researcher Teacher or Professor Student Random Interested Person	Institution If used for a course, the name and number: Country Please type the following letters from the image, to discourage spambots.

Or if you are without honor, you may skip this step and simply download the text as a PDF (25MB).

Tip Jar

Like the book? I accept tips through Paypal via my email address (which you can find on the front page of the book).

Multimedia for the Book

As part of the course, I also prepared links to a variety of web pages, videos, etc. illustrating how various devices and concepts sounded. Here they are:

• Introductory topics
• Representation of sound
• The Fourier transform
• Additive synthesis
• Modulation
• Subtractive synthesis
• Oscillators, Amplifiers, and Combiners
• Filters
• Frequency Modulation Synthesis
• Effects and Physical Modeling

Related Software

I have made some pieces of software referenced in the text. They are all open source:

• Gizmo is an Arduino-based MIDI tool with lots of built-in features, like a step sequencer, advanced arpeggiator, note recorder, MIDI gauge and control surface, etc.
• Flow is a polyphonic, modular, additive software synthesizer. It is quite unusual, powerful, and CPU-hungry. I think you'll have fun with it.
• Edisyn is a patch editor tookit with support for a number of synthesizers. Edisyn is unusual in that it has (to my knowledge) the most sophisticated set of patch exploration tools in any publically available program. Edisyn is designed to make it easy to explore complex patch parameter spaces, such as for FM.

Feedback

This book relies on your feedback to improve it. If you have any complaints, bug-fixes, or suggestions, send email to sean@cs.gmu.edu . If you have a particularly major change to make, I can be convinced to provide you with the original LaTeX source for the document to enable you to make suggested changes freely.

How to Cite the Book

Because it's an online text, you need to be careful with your citation. The correct citation is:

Sean Luke, 2021, Computational Music Synthesis, first edition, available for free at http://cs.gmu.edu/~sean/book/synthesis/

Please always include the URL—it's the only unique identifier to the text! If you prefer BibTeX:

@Book{ Luke2021Synthesis, author = { Sean Luke }, title = { Computational Music Synthesis }, edition = { first }, year = { 2021 }, note = { Available for free at http://cs.gmu.edu/$\\sim$sean/book/synthesis/ } }

Open License

The text is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License, except for certain portions of the work licensed under other licenses as mentioned in the frontmatter of the text. A quick license summary:

1. You are free to redistribute this document.
2. You may not modify, transform, or build upon the document except for personal use.
3. You must maintain the author's attribution of the document at all times.
4. You may not use the attribution to imply that the author endorses you or your document use.

This summary is just informational: if there is any conflict in interpretation between the summary and the actual license, the actual license always takes precedence.

Note that this license does not extend to the source files used to produce the document. Those are still mine (for now).