SOME RELATED SITES

SOME RELATED BOOKS AND SITES

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BOOKS:

Music, Cognition, and Computerized Sound: an Introduction to Psychoacoustics, edited by Perry R. Cook This is a wonderful book, answering many questions related to what is going on with the perception of music, all the way from the outer ear to the brain, as well as science can tell us with the current state of knowledge. It handles the involved disciplines: engineering, psychology, and music, with accuracy and clarity. I must add that it does assume a basic knowledge of musical tones and scales, and also, that if one is looking for the precise mathematical techniques of signal analysis, those are not in the scope of this book. (Many good books exist for that.) Amazon's Offering |

Psychology of Music, Carl E. Seashore. This book, from 1938, and available as a Dover reprint, discusses miscellaneous musical psychology topics, including timbre, consonance, rhythm, the nature of musical thinking, and musical talent. Much of it is based on frequency plots. There are (fundamental) frequency plots of the instruments in a string quartet (relating to intentional deviations from the precise note), frequency plots of singing showing vibrato such as this one:

Vibrato

(showing frequency above and volume below), and many more frequency plots. For the the best understanding of the Psychology of Music, this is not a good choice, since the 1938 perspective limits it. But it is a fun look at some good, diligent work done back in the 30's, with still-valid and still-informative frequency plots.
Amazon's Offering |

Time-Frequency Analysis, Leon Cohen. This book covers a wide range of topics on the analysis of frequency as it changes over time. It covers continuous Fourier analysis and many other techniques. Discrete techniques are not covered. The book is NOT a general signal analysis or signal processing book. Amazon's Offering |

SITES: THEORY- AND PSYCHOACOUSTICS- RELATED

Teoria Music Theory Site. This site is devoted to music theory, and has references, articles, interesting java software to aid in learning (these the creation of the site-creator--Jose Rodriguez Alvira), and some other things. It is both devoted to traditional music theory, and technological approaches. I found the links quite good, with some that I have not seen before. In particular, there are links to analysis pages, and there is at least one link to an analysis page where the analysis plays along with the highlighted music.

Philip Rees Physics of Sound and Music links and Music Theory links

Sengpiel Audio Links Site. A collection of links to audio related sites, included some psychoacoustics ones. Most of the sites are in German, but a lot are in English. There are 7 or so pages of links here: use the next and back buttons to get to the other pages.

Musical Animation Machine Site. (Stephen Malinowski.) Stephen has produced a video of an animated score, with tonal cues in color. (This is quite similar to the piano-roll view shown above.) An example can be examined on his site, and he has videotapes of these available at modest price. He also has DOS software available (for free) to create these. Stephen also mentioned to me that he has himself used the circular representation of pitch in visualizations, though these did not make it to his videotapes. (I would have bought one!)

Stanford Computer-Based Music Theory and Acoustics Ph.D. candidate Craig Stuart Sapp's Site With Links
and public bookmarks (music, computer, and of general interest to intelligent people.)

SPECTROGRAM SOFTWARE:

My Musically-Oriented Spectratune. It has a free trial, and a permanent license is pretty cheap.

Ham Radio Operator DL4YHFs free audio spectrum analyser . A Fast Fourier Transform based analyzer, it isn't as good at telling precise tones as mine. But its fun, and you can learn from it.

Cornell Ornithological Laboratory's free Raven-Lite audio spectrum analyser.. Another Fast Fourier Transform based analyzer, designed for spectrograms of bird calls. It has other uses, as well, of course.

Visualization Software Spectrogram Software. (Visualization Software Company.) You can try out this program for free (trial version restricted to 10 minutes per session), and upgrade to the full program for $25. Again, a Fast Fourier Transform analyzer.

Plug for Questia: For those not familiar with it, Questia is a digital academic-type library with about 60,000 fully searchable academic-level books, and some articles.

The collection has some older, out-of-print books, but also many recent books. Though it is not as complete as a decent university library (by far), I've subscribed to this for a few years, and find it an invaluable reference when trying to, say, get some criticism on a novel, or get some details on a historical, social scientific, or philosophical item. The library is not strong on science, but it is decent throughout the humanities. And the full-text searchability -- over all books, or within a book, is really useful.

Thus, I am disappointed at the Questia marketing strategy of gearing towards college students, which strategy becomes apparent as soon as you log onto the sign-up site. I am not disappointed at Questia, but rather that the real world has made it such that a partly-adult-geared strategy won't work. That is, mostly, the people are after the books on the Questia site so that they can go through college. And mostly, they are going through college so that they can get a better job. Anyway, as a 50-year old man who went to college some years ago, I recommend the site for the intellectually curious. Note Questia often has a free full-service trial.

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