Programming for Musicians and Digital Artists

While many excellent tools exist for digital image creation and editing, similar tools for manipulating sound with precise timing and control are few and far between. ChucK, an audio-centric programming language, opens new vistas for sound artistry. The ChucK language provides precise high-level control over time, audio computation, and user interface elements like track pads and joysticks. Because ChucK uses the vocabulary of sound, it's easy to learn even for artists with little or no exposure to computer programming.

Programming for Musicians and Digital Artists offers a complete introduction to programming in the open source music language ChucK. It's an example driven easy-to-follow book, that allows readers to create meaningful and rewarding digital compositions and "instruments" that make sound and music in direct response to program logic, scores, gestures, and other systems connected via MIDI or the network.

Purchase of the print book comes with an offer of a free PDF, ePub, and Kindle eBook from Manning. Also available is all code from the book.

Ajay Kapur is currently the Director of the Music Technology program (MTIID) at the California Institute of the Arts, as well as the Associate Dean for Research and Development in Digital Arts. Kapur is also a Senior Lecturer in the Sonic Engineering Labs for Creative Technology (SELCT) at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. He has also published over 80 technical papers and presented lectures across the world on music technology, human computer interface for artists, robotics for making sound, and modern digital orchestras

Perry R. Cook served as Stanford's Technical Director of the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, until joining the faculty of Princeton University in 1996 as a Professor of Computer Science, with a joint appointment in music. Along with working for companies such as NeXT Inc., Media Vision, Xenon/Chromatic, Interval Research, and mobile music App giant SMule, Cook has published over 200 technical and music papers and has lectured worldwide on the acoustics of the voice and musical instrument simulation, human perception of sound, and interactive devices for expressive musical performance. He is also the author of the Synthesis Toolkit in C++ (STK), and co-author of the ChucK audio programming language.

Spencer Salazar is a doctoral student at the Stanford Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), researching computer-based forms of music performance and experience. He has created interfaces for ChucK, developed prototype consumer electronics, architected large-scale social music interactions for SMule, composed for laptop and mobile phone ensembles, and taught numerous workshops on computer music topics.

Ge Wang is the creator and chief architect of the ChucK audio programming language. He is an Assistant Professor at Stanford University's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) where his research includes programming languages and interactive software systems for computer music, mobile and social music, new performance ensembles paradigms (e.g., live coding), interfaces for human-computer interaction, musical visualization, and methodologies for education at the intersection of computer science and music. Ge is also the co-founder of mobile music startup SMule (over 100 million users) and the designer of the iPhone's Ocarina and Magic Piano.