A Digital Signal Processing Primer: with Applications to Digital Audio and Computer Music

Superb Intro to DSP, extremely poor binding
Masterful introduction to DSP concepts. The author uses concrete examples to develop a natural intuition to what DSP is about, drawing from the familiar field of acoustics and music synthesis. As a familiar experience to almost everyone, the phenomenology of sound is an effective context that beautifully ties together the concepts of acoustic resonance to the fundamental building blocks that comprise the field of DSP— complex sinusoids and the linear filter. The new DSP student will buy this book and use it as the first rung of a ladder to begin the exciting climb into this essential field which is pervasive in all modern communications, remote sensing, music synthesis, and machine learning. The only complaint I have about this book is the poor quality of the binding— my copy began to fall apart within the first week of use. Although the poor quality of the binding in no way diminishes my rating of the book, I would hope to see if a hard copy exists. Otherwise I’ll just have to buy another copy in due time.

Accessible DSP Text geared for those interested in audio
This is a different kind of digital signal processing textbook in just about every way. To begin with, chapter one starts out talking about sinusoids in the context of tuning forks, when just about every other DSP book under the sun starts with a review of linear systems. This is good, in that throughout the book your eye is kept on the ball of actual audio applications. This can be somewhat troublesome in that the author sometimes has to delve into mathematics that the typical DSP student may not be ready for – the wave equation and elementary partial differential equations for example. The author ultimately does get the job done, however, explaining the DFT, FFT, z-transform, and filter design all within the context of audio signals. It is true that only the last chapter is explicitly labeled “Audio and Musical Applications”. However, this only means that the author is discussing complex applications in this chapter only, after the groundwork has been laid for all of the theory. I would especially recommend this book to people interested in computer music that need to get up to speed on DSP. Such students may also appreciate “DSP Filter Cookbook” by John Lane. It is all about the implementation of audio filters and contains C++ source code and schematics. If you are a traditional student of DSP and digital audio does not interest you, you might want to go a more traditional route starting out with “Understanding Digital Signal Processing” by Lyon and proceeding on to a more advanced text such as “Discrete Time Signal Processing” by Oppenheimer or “Digital Signal Processing: Principles, Algorithms and Applications” by Proakis.

great DSP introduction, focus on computer music
This is the only DSP book I would recommend for a beginner. This is an especially great book for someone without an EE background who doesn’t know much about signals, or someone who doesn’t know/care about analog filters. I found the book quite practical, and was able to implement working digital filters after reading it. But, it also gave me a good understanding of the theory.I’ve gotten other DSP books since then, including the famed Oppenheim, and I’ve been rather disappointed with each of them. The book is a lot more readable and less abstract than the others.I do wish this book covered more topics.. Some more specifics about Butterworth and Chebyshev filters would have been nice. If you just want sample code for building a filter, you won’t get it.However, this book covers some topics which I haven’t seen covered well elsewhere, like comb filters, resonators, reverb, and digital simulation of a plucked string. So it’s still worth getting even if you already know about DSP and have other books.

Not exactly beginner friendly
While this is more approachable than other texts about DSP, that is really not saying much. The preface claims that the book was intended to be approachable for a general audience…but that is basically hilarious after even an afternoon of reading.Even the first set of problems after one chapter suggests you delve into mathematical constructs that most engineers forget after they graduate college. The second chapter and beyond casually mention concepts from discrete math and differential equations mid-sentence without even pausing to define them. And commonplace terms that happen to have domain-specific definitions are used without even a footnote to specify what is going on.Either this text is intended to accompany a very specific lecture plan, or the author is so far up the ivory tower that he cannot fathom what it is like not to already know all the material in the field. I cannot know which is true, but I suspect the latter.

1章から音声をベクトルで表したり、ほかの書物であまり見ることの少ない表現をしていました。ただ、5章あたりからは他の書籍で良くある話がメインでしたので、それまでの章から考えると少し残念です。また、当たり前ですがベクトル以外にも数学的な知識が必要です。MATLABやmatplotlibでグラフ化しながら学習すると、なお理解度は深まります。