Basicsynth

Book excerpt: Books on music synthesizers explain the theory of music synthesis, or show you how to use an existing synthesizer, but don't cover the practical details of constructing a custom software synthesizer. Likewise, books on digital signal processing describe sound generation in terms of complex equations and leave it up to the reader to solve the practical problems of programming the equations. BasicSynth takes you beyond the theory and shows you how to create a custom synthesizer in software using the C++ programming language. The first part of the book explains the basic computer algorithms used to generate and process sound. Subsequent chapters explain instrument design using actual synthesis instruments. The example instruments are then combined with a text-based scoring system and sequencer to produce a complete working synthesizer. Complete source code to the C++ classes and example programs is available for download from the Internet.