For this demo a variety of sound signals were recorded in a recording studio at the Center for New Music and Audio Technology (CNMAT). These recordings were
converted into digital signals using an Analog to Digital Converter
(ADC). Software synthesis programs generated a sound file as their
output (a sound file is simply a data
file stored on a disk). After all the samples for a composition are
calculated the sound file can be played and heard through a Digital to
Analog Converter (DAC).
For the details on how sound can be
recorded into computer sound files see the 1996 book
by Curtis Roads, The Computer Music Tutorial
(The MIT Press)
Many different sound file formats exist. The
differences between such formats are mainly the rate at
which the sound signal was sampled and the number of bits per stored
sample. This information is usually contained in the header of such
files. The sound files used in this work were sampled at 44.1~kHz and
used 16-bit words. The particular format used by the SGI computers, at
CNMAT, is the Audio Interface File Format (aiff). The CNMAT aiff files
are in stereo
(two channels are recorded). For this work only the
left channel was
used and for these files the left and right channels were practically
equal. The aiff sound files used in this work are available via ftp
from the CNMAT server.