2. Synthesis and Vectorized Computation

In Chapter 1 we built the conceptual foundation of digital audio: how analog sound \(x(t)\) gets sampled, quantized, and stored on a computer as an array of numbers. This chapter is an introduction to programming techniques that will allow you to synthesize and manipulate those arrays. We’ll write our first real synthesis code, learn vectorized computation in NumPy (the library that we’ll use extensively for computer music programming in Python), and introduce Pyquist, a lightweight Python library that wraps NumPy to provide basic computer music primitives.