Designing Sound (MIT Press) - Essential Guide for Audio Engineers, Musicians & Sound Designers | Perfect for Studio, Film & Game Audio Production

I found this book in my quest to learn how to create sounds Ab Initio (from nothing but basic principles, not recorded samples). This is absolutely the right book for those interested in that area. This book is NOT for audio beginners. You will need to have a good grasp of basic digital audio concepts, understand frequency domain analysis concepts, a bit about DSP filters, have payed attention at those Physics classes and at least be familiar with some of the math. Andy tries to get away with not writing too many equations, but he still throws a differential equation on you to explain harmonic oscillators and some trigonometry when explaining modulation, for example. I have found nothing in its 600+ that I would remove or skip over. In fact, I just wish he had written 1,200 more pages!! There are four main sections in the book: Theory, Tools, Techniques and Practicals. Theory includes background information on acoustics, psychoacoustics, sound perception and digital signals. The Tools section will introduce you and get you productive using Pure Data, the free and deceptively simple looking visual sound programming software package used throughout the rest of the book. In Techniques you will get practical information on the various sound synthesis methods at your disposal, and the Practicals section has dozens of example uses of these techniques. You will, for example, learn how to create models for telephone bells, rolling objects, fire, running water, etc.Like another reviewer said, you will not get every single detail of every single technique or theory in this book. You will get enough to get a good idea, good examples and excellent links in the reference sections so you can go wild and study any of the ideas in the book much further by yourself.Some of the sample code links for the MIT Press version of the book are broken. I contacted Andy Farnell directly by email about this, and he was kind enough to point to his other website which does not have this problem . I hope the MIT Press folks fix this soon, but even with the broken links, the code is available in the website in text areas, so you can cut and paste it and save it in a file and it will work, but is more tedious.I could not recommend this book anymore. It's a great introduction into a fascinating field. As a disclaimer, I am not an audio person, but a software engineer interested in audio with a bit of DSP background from school. I imagine audio professionals might have a different experience with the book, but I can't imagine anybody calling it anything but an excellent, epic work.