In the early 1960s a way of efficiently turning sound into bits and
bytes was discovered. These analog-to-digital converters,
capable of turning one second worth of sound into 300,000
numbers (on the fly!) made it possible to turn the acoustic
waves that we hear as sound: conversations, car horns, your
mother-in-law's voice and even music could now be transformed
into long sequences of numbers, which were then stored in
computer memories.

From there they could then be turned back into the original sounds, but this was not a big advance since the ability to simply record a sound had been known for quite some time. No, more than that, what was now possible is that sound
could be so easily manipulated, just as a chunk of data,
that the creative potential for musical composition and
sound generation enabled a revolution in the world of music.
That revolution is the world of electroacoustic music
and it is a wonderful synthesis of music, mathematics and
computing...whose all-powerful deity is Kraftwerk...sing,
"we are the robots"! ;-)

This is a book which means to introduce the reader to the mathematical,
physical and computer science challenges and achievements that have made
digital audio and electroacoustic music possible.

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