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Reviewed by:
  • DSP: Digital Sound Processing
  • Bill Sack
DSP: Digital Sound Processing CD-ROM, 2000, US$ 27.00; Norwegian Network for Technology, Acoustics and Music (NoTAM), P.O. Box 1137, Blindern, N-0317, Oslo, Norway; Web www.notam.uio.no/DSP/; available from CDeMUSIC, 116 North Lake Avenue, Albany, New York 12206, USA; telephone (888) 749-9998; (518) 434-4110; fax (518) 434-0308; electronic mail emf@emf.org; Web www.cdemusic.org/.

Very little is currently available in the field of sound creation software for young people, and the few examples that come to mind are little more than toys. Enter DSP, a feature-filled and educational computer music program for children.

The first version of DSP was developed by Jøran Rudi at the Norwegian Network for Technology, Acoustics and Music (NoTAM) in 1997 to teach computer music techniques and repertory to children in Norway. The product under review is the second version, which has been translated into other languages, including English. DSP is a stand-alone program consisting of software tools for the creation and manipulation of sounds, plus extensive hyper-text documentation about the program as well as short tutorials on the physics of sound and the basics of digital audio.


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DSP can install and run on any IBM-compatible PC with a 486 or better processor running Windows 95, 98, or 2000. Hardware requirements are a CD-ROM drive, a graphics card capable of displaying thousands of colors, and a 16-bit sound card. The program makes modest system demands and can run on the sort of aging hardware that might be encountered in publicly funded schools. It installs from its CD through the familiar Windows installation dialogue. A copy of Microsoft's Internet Explorer 5 is included; the program needs it to display documentation. The installation process will upgrade older versions or can be skipped if an equivalent or newer version is already present. The DSP executable file is copied onto the machine's hard drive, while the documentation and demonstration files remain on the CD. However, and contrary to the program booklet, the CD must be in the drive in order for the program to run.

DSP's graphics have a stylized, "aged" look reminiscent of Myst, a popular computer game from several years ago. The program's widgets and buttons are witty and clever: instead of a static trash can icon, there is an animated fish with exaggeratedly large teeth that "eats" unwanted [End Page 92] soundclips which are dragged to it. This part of the program seems to have been designed to appeal to younger computer users whose previous experience with computers may have been through gaming.


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Figure 1.

Mix window of DSP.

The main interface is the Mix window, a five track timeline on which monaural sounds can be easily arranged by dragging them around with a mouse (see Figure 1). Volume and pan settings for each track can be set using graphic breakpoint envelopes, and the result can then be played back through the audio output or mixed down to a stereo 16-bit WAV file.

Functions for recording, editing, and synthesis are located in submenus of the Sound menu. The integrated sound editor can be used to record new files through any sound card input. It has buttons for adjusting the volume of a sound, fading in and out, copying, cutting, and pasting. Unfortunately, only one editor window can be open at a time, making it impossible to cut and paste between two different sounds. Available synthesis functions include FM, Karplus-Strong plucked string, two-formant filtered buzz, eight-partial additive, and white noise, all with parameters controlled by graphic breakpoint envelopes.

Some of the most interesting features of DSP are available through the Distort menu. Tools here include Granulate (granular processing), Time Stretch, Scratch (forward and reverse variable speed playback), Spectral Shift, Spectral Sieve, and Algorithms. Spectral Sieve and Spectral Shift are FFT-resynthesis tools; the former filters a sound by selectively removing spectral components and is useful for certain types of noise reduction, while the latter produces drastically altered sounds by shifting...

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