In Thursday’s class we’ll discuss some fundamentals of managing audio data within a program as an array or stream of samples. In preparation for that:

1) In The Theory and Technique of Electronic Music by Miller Puckette, read the section on “Sinusoids, Amplitude, and Frequency” and its first five subsections, “Measures of Amplitude” through “Synthesizing a Sinusoid”. It’s presented in general mathematical/conceptual terms rather than in any actual programming language; in class we’ll work to clarify and apply what he has written.

2) Think about how you would compute a sinusoid, in whatever programming language you’re most comfortable. If you have the time, try actually doing it. You don’t have to write a program that both computes and plays the sound, but at least try to make a program that presents the data as some form of output, either a list of numbers, plotted as a graph, or whatever you know how to do. You don’t have to hand that in (unless you’d like to), but trying to do it yourself will definitely solidify the concepts in your mind. If you do want to hand it in, you can use the EEE DropBox called “Sinusoid1”.