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Vol. 37 Issue 4 Reviews Reviews > Recordings >
Dan Hosken: Music Technology and the Project Studio: Synthesis and Sampling
Hardcover, 2012, ISBN 978-0-415-99723-2, 272 pages, illustrated, index; available from Routledge,
Taylor and Francis Group, 270 Madison Avenue, New York, New York, USA; telephone (212) 216-
7800; fax: (212) 563-2269; Web www.routledge.com/.
Reviewed by Douglas Geers
New York, USA
In the Winter 2011 issue of the Computer Music
Journal, I wrote a review of Dan Hosken’s book An Introduction to Music Technology.
Among other things, I praised the book’s clear, concise writing and its focus on a range of
audio topics that I think are valuable for
today’s musicians to understand. However I did note that Hosken’s chapters on software synthesizers and samplers seemed a bit more
in-depth than I felt necessary in such a book,
and that perhaps they could have been edited
down a bit, since, to me, they were topics
beyond the introductory stages.
As it turns out, those chapters in An
Introduction to Music Technology were an
overview in comparison to the thorough
treatment Hosken gives them in his more
recent text, Music Technology and the Project
Studio. WhereasAn Introduction to Music
Technology was oriented toward a general
audience of musicians wanting to grasp music
technology from microphones and cables to
software, the new book focuses mostly on the
use of software synthesizers and samplers for
sound design, composition, and arranging. Both
books seem aimed at undergraduate music
technology students, and from the similarities
between them I could imagine that they were
initially supposed to be a single, larger text but
were separated due to issues of length, focus,
price, and target audience.
I must admit that I felt some reservations upon first reading Music Technology and the Project
Studio, since much of it deals with the use of digital audio workstation (DAW) software and control of
software samplers and synthesizers via MIDI. Some of these reservations stemmed from my
disappointment that, three decades after its introduction, MIDI is still the standard control protocol
for commercial synthesizers. I feel a tinge of regret that any students today must spend time
learning about MIDI note-on and note-off messages, memorizing that MIDI continuous controller
number seven handles channel volume, and figuring out how to express nearly all musical
parameters as integers within the range of 0–127.
This bias aside, I realize that MIDI is still the standard in commercial music software and hardware
(yes, some hardware still exists) and that, despite my complaints, clever musicians can accomplish
much using these products. I do include MIDI basics in my own teaching and I use a MIDI controller
when I perform. While we await the rumored MIDI Manufacturers Association’s HD specification, we are stuck with this thirty-year-old, serial, eight-bit protocol.
As mentioned above, Hosken’s intended audience for Music Technology and the Project Studio is
those who want to use commercial DAW programs and plug-ins to create electronic music, broadly
defined. My first reaction upon reading about the focus on DAWs in the book’s introduction was
“What? DAWs for synthesis and sound design? Not Max, Csound, or Supercollider?” However, upon further reflection I realized that Hosken’s choice makes sense for this book, since (1) many in the
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target audience would likely not be curious and committed enough to learn one of the applications
mentioned above at such an early stage in their education, and (2) DAWs today are rich
environments that allow users to focus on outcomes rather than building their own instruments,
which is what Music N-derived applications encourage. Most DAWs include some kind of analog-
synthesis-emulating instrument, and when these and other sound-producing plug-ins are used
cleverly, the DAW environment can be quite powerful.
It is worth noting that Hosken does not choose a particular DAW but rather speaks about
commonalities and shows screen shots from a variety of them. In general, his focus is on theory and
implementation, not the click-by-click instruction given by texts like Learn Pro Tools 11. I think this is
a good choice and will increase the longevity of the text.
Thus, rather than being disappointed that Hosken wasn’t pushing students into powerful software platforms that I enjoy, I came to appreciate his enterprise, which is to coax relative beginners away
from using timbral presets into understanding how sounds may be created, shaped, and deployed
even within the warm conformity of the DAW applications. In short, this text intends to teach the use
of instruments, not the programming of them. It seems that he is hoping to inform students about
the world of musical sound design and synthesis in hopes that readers will pursue these avenues of
creativity in their own work. He is meeting them on their own turf and trying to entice them to think
in electroacoustic terms and to pay much more care to the sounds themselves in their music. This
strategy of educating by anchoring new ideas to familiar ones has gained much currency in
educational theory in recent years (James E. Zull’s The Art of Changing the Brain is an excellent
overview of these ideas).
Another consideration regarding Hosken’s approach, harkening back to my “Why not Csound?” reaction above, is to what degree it might be that I, a composer of electroacoustic music, feel
threatened by the ease with which one may now create sounds and compositions. I equate a portion
of my compositional skill with my ability to create interesting sonic objects, and it can be
disconcerting to ponder the multitude of hours I’ve spent with Cmix, Csound, and Max, building systems that may not sound as sonically rich as output from contemporary DAW plug-ins. Somehow I
feel that programming my own sounds makes me a ‘serious’ composer rather than a ‘knob twiddler,’ and using DAW plug-ins seems too easy. However, even as long ago as 1990 Paul Lansky proposed a
new category of computer music creators in his article “A View from the Bus: When Machines Make Music” (Perspectives of New Music, Vol. 28/2, Summer 1990). This category consists of instrument
builders, those who design and create sound-making systems that are then used by composers and
performers. For decades in computer music most composers were their own instrument builders,
mostly using applications derived from the Music-N paradigm; and despite my rational understanding
my intuitive side is having difficulty accepting that one may still be ‘serious’ when employing sounds created with such widely-used commercial audio production applications. Interestingly, it is the use
of DAW sounds that disturb me the most, not the act of mixing itself.
Turning back to Hosken’s text, Music Technology and the Project Studio reminds me of books that I
read and valued when I began learning electronic music years ago, such as Craig Anderton’s MIDI for
Musicians and Scott Wilkinson’s Anatomy of a Home Studio, both of which are of course ridiculously
outdated now. For me, the Anderton and Wilkinson books were straightforward sources of practical
information to help beginners become oriented and informed enough to begin producing music. In
fact Hosken’s first book, An Introduction to Music Technology, is probably more closely congruent
with the Anderton and Wilkinson texts and his Music Technology and the Project Studio is,
appropriately, the sequel, connecting the realm of the introductory to aspirations toward more
sophisticated resources such as Curtis Roads’ The Computer Music Tutorial, which, although ancient
by today’s standards with its 1996 copyright, is still my most beloved computer music text, one that I still dream might someday be regenerated in a second edition; or Charles Dodge and Thomas
Jerse’s Computer Music, which is less exhaustive than the Roads text but wonderfully oriented toward
composers, written in a more consistent, conversational voice, and contains many examples of
specific works that employ techniques discussed.
As with An Introduction to Music Technology, Hosken’s prose style in Music Technology and the
Project Studio is clear and concise, reminding me of the Dodge and Jerse text mentioned above. Put
simply, Hosken is a good textbook writer, packing in a lot of information without things becoming
dense or arcane. His explanations are generally well done, and the figures are similarly uncluttered
and easy to read.
The book is organized into nine chapters, of which the first three chapters are condensed reviews of
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sound, digital audio, and MIDI. Hosken assumes some familiarity with these topics, perhaps from
reading his first book, but nevertheless presents enough information on each topic that this text could
be used by itself as the sole textbook for a course. This works well, except that readers who
purchased An Introduction to Music Technology may be a bit annoyed that nearly one third of the
new text reviews topics already discussed in the first one. And those with no previous experience
might find the pace of the opening chapters a bit too quick.
In these introductory chapters Hosken makes some difficult choices regarding how much detail to
provide, as in the first chapter’s discussion of decibels. There he defines dB SPL and dB SIL and shows the formulas for them, but does not dissect the formulas in detail, give examples, nor attempt
to explain logarithms. In these chapters and throughout the text some more advanced concepts
(although not logarithms) are included as sidebar pages labeled “Technically Speaking.” This sidebar technique provides interested readers with a bit more detail and keeps much of the math out of the
main text.
In chapter four Hosken dives into his main enterprise, laying out the essentials of sound synthesis
and sampling for beginners. Here I imagine him addressing the thousands of young people who have
begun their compositional journey with Garageband, Reason, or Ableton Live and then become
intrigued enough to enroll in a music technology course. Hosken assumes that the reader knows
nothing about the underlying theory, even defining the terms synthesis and sampling on the chapter’s first page. He proceeds to explain modular synthesis using a simple hypothetical synthesizer
consisting of an oscillator, lowpass filter, and an ADSR amplifier, and then tells how MIDI messages
may be used to control this system. He follows this with a similarly-styled explanation of sampling
and MIDI control of samplers.
Chapter five, “Modulation and Dynamic Sound,” reveals Hosken’s serious electroacoustic agenda. In it he introduces and connects multiple methods for animating digital sounds, including the use of
envelopes, LFOs, modulation routing, and chaining modulation sources. Here the conceptual
reference is again analog modular synthesis. In fact, while reading this chapter I guessed that Hosken
was lucky enough to have had significant experience with analog synthesis hardware early in his own
education, and I reaffirmed my goal to acquire an analog synthesizer at my university for teaching
purposes.
The next three chapters continue to widen and deepen the purview, with discussions of oscillator
combinations, noise sources, modulation synthesis, and additional filter types (chapter six), additional
synthesis techniques (chapter seven), and other timbral effects, including dynamics, spectrum, and
delay-based alterations (chapter eight). Of these, chapter six stands out as especially thorough and
successful, and essentially completes Hosken’s description of classical analog synthesis techniques.
Chapter seven discusses multiple wavetable, additive, FM, physical modeling, and granular synthesis
techniques. Because of the potential complexity of each of these, their individual discussions feel like
the tips of various icebergs. The explanations are fine for beginners, but in a text that has ‘synthesis’ in its title one would hope for more depth here, especially for the multiple wavetable and additive
techniques, each given less than three pages of attention. For those and the other synthesis
methods, more generous use of examples with figures and illustrations would help. Moreover, it
would have been useful to include a list of other synthesis methods beyond those in the text that
readers might investigate.
In addition to the synthesis methods themselves, in chapter seven Hosken introduces the idea of
“synthesis programming applications,” his term for programs such as Reaktor, Max, Csound, etc. that allow one to program synthesizer components in a Music-N manner. Near the end of the chapter he
first presents a general explanation and justification as to why one might wish to use these platforms
and then devotes nearly eight pages to a case study in which he compares how Csound and Max
could be used to program a simple FM instrument, including step-by-step walk-throughs of the
Csound texts and Max patcher. To me, this window into more sophisticated approaches is worthwhile,
although I imagine that many beginners will scratch their heads while reading these pages.
Hosken ends the book with “MIDI in Detail,” and one may correctly assume from my anti-MIDI rant
above that I was not enthused with another large section of the book devoted to MIDI arcana.
Nevertheless, it does provide good explanations of topics such as status bytes versus data bytes,
system exclusive messages, and so forth for those who wish to take the plunge.
Overall, this is a well-done text, and I would consider it for use in my own teaching. After the reviews
in chapters one to three and laying the synthesis groundwork in chapter four, chapters five and six
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are high points of the book, revealing the power of modular synthesis in detail. While FM is treated
quite thoroughly, I wish there were more details regarding the other synthesis techniques presented
in chapter seven.
An interesting addition to a text such as this would be some discussion