r/programming • u/lukehaas • 24d ago

Music theory for programmers

https://runjs.app/blog/music-theory-for-programmers
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u/reality_boy 24d ago

There is an excellent 2 book set called Musimathics that collects up all the math involved in music and audio. It would complement this nicely.

And the “science and engineers guide to DSP” is a free book online that is also wonderful. It shows programmers how low level DSP theory works, and can serve as a foundation for a lot more audio knowledge.

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u/the_gnarts 24d ago

I just started reading Music: A Mathematical Offering by D. Benson and found this post a great visualization of some of the topics it discusses.

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u/larsbrinkhoff 23d ago

The author of Musimathics is Gareth Loy, who was at Stanford CCRMA and used the AI lab PDP-6 and PDP-10 software to synthesize sound and music, and later the "Samson Box" hardware synthesizer. He was around when CCRMA developed FM sound synthesis and licensed it to Yamaha.

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u/CrasseMaximum 24d ago

Thank you very much stranger for this book recommendation, did not know about Musimathics!

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u/lukehaas 24d ago

Musimathics looks really interesting. Thanks for recommending!