Music creation in the western culture has traditionally been a two step process. First, the composer creates a musical score. Then the score is handed over to the musician to interpret the notated music. We will see that in both processes, the computer plays an important role. Sound synthesis techniques allow the creation of new sounds and have been the subject of many research projects. Programs for the specification, control, and execution of synthesis techniques are wide spread. Less common is the research on computer aided music composition. In this domain, tools, data structures, and interfaces are defined to help to composer to represent, organize, and explore musical ideas. Although, with the use of computer, the gap between musical writing and sonic realization can be bridged conceptually, most existing environments for computer music maintain the separation between musical writing and performance. It is our believe that this separation greatly prevents exploring the possibilities offered by the computer. We are interested in the fine tuning of the relations, algorithms, and parameters that describe the organization of a music piece on every possible level of abstraction. In this chapter we give a brief overview of the concepts, techniques, and programs found in the field of computer music.

2.1 Sound synthesis

• Digitizing sound
• Signal models
• Synthesis applications