The Essentials of Music Technology (review)

In his Preface to The Essentials of Music Technology, Mark Ballora, of Penn State University, explains that his book is meant to serve as a general reference for music technology courses. The author defines music technology as the use of the computer and its integration into all aspects of music education and production. He describes the content of the book as "an attempt to find a balance between simple and straightforward presentations and descriptions that are thorough enough to explain the material without 'dumbing it down"' (p. vii). The book's only assumption, Mr. Ballora says, is that students be familiar with a computer operating system. He states that although certain concepts are best presented with mathematical equations, no advanced mathematical training is necessary to understand the main points of the book.

A reference book should be viewed from a practical point of view: does it contain useful and well-organized information? And, for whom is it a reference: student, teacher, or a musician outside of academia? In summarizing the contents of the chapters I hope to give the readers a sense of whether the book functions adequately as a reference text for their own particular situation.

Titled "Basic Acoustics," chapter 1 covers wave propagation, harmonics, phase, speed, and velocity. There are good examples using the traditional rope and tube analogies plus well-drawn diagrams to illustrate the concepts presented. Chapter 2, "Music and Acoustics," shows the author's predilection for quantitative description. He spends little time on the subjective aspect of acoustics and uses much of the 20-page chapter to elucidate the mathematics of frequency, loudness and power, harmonics, Fourier analysis, and consonance and dissonance. Mr. Ballora does a good job introducing logarithms as a perceptual concept behind these building blocks of sound. Chapter 3, "Acoustic Factors in Combination: Perceptual Issues," takes a quick look at amplitude envelopes, simulated localization in audio systems, and the mismatch between measurement and perception in the areas of phase, timbre, and loudness. Mr. Ballora doesn't dwell for long outside the realm of objective measurement, so the issues he raises in this chapter seem unnecessarily diminished by the brevity of their treatment.

Chapter 4, "Introduction to Computers," is a four-page overview of what is meant by the term multimedia, what the Internet and streaming media are, and the Web's usefulness as a music research tool. The simplistic nature of the information presented in this chapter is, I believe, a serious oversight, especially for readers who want to learn, for example, the technical differences between audio codecs and streaming media formats used in the rapidly developing network-based music distribution system. Chapter 5, "Representing Numbers," is a five-page summary based on the author's stated desire that we see beyond the graphic use of the computer and recognize its calculator roots. Included are paragraphs on base numbers, the binary system, some terminology (such as byte, LSB, nibble), hexadecimal numbers, and integers.

Chapter 6, "Introduction to MIDI," begins with a cursory two-page history of electronic music from World War II to MIDI's introduction in 1983. There are several pages describing the basic types of music software followed by diagrams of various cabling possibilities for computer/ MIDI-device setups. Some of this information seems, again, almost too basic. Do we need, for example, a photo of the three MIDI jacks on the back of a synthesizer? A much more comprehensive and technical view of the MIDI specification follows in chapter 7, "The MIDI Language." Here, Mr. Ballora explains all MIDI messages at the byte level with both hex and binary examples. Included is a short section on MIDI synchronization, including how to set up Frequency Shift Keying on an analog tape recorder, and a half-page on MIDI Time Code. I think more information about syncing MIDI devices would be of use to the many musicians...