Third Edition (SS&SIII)

After a long gestation, the third edition of my book, Sound Synthesis and Sampling, is now out. A lot has changed behind the scenes of this edition, although a quick flick through will reveal that many of the diagrams are the same - so don't use that as your acid test for change. In fact, the organisation of chapters, their contents, and especially the words, have all changed.

There have been casualties too. In a moment that feels almost like part of an episode of my favourite TV show of the moment, Desperate Housewives, the Glossary has moved out. Currently I'm putting the finishing touches to an entirely new glossary that will be the same and very different, as well as improved. Watch out here for more news as it happens. There are also a few other surprises that I'm working on.

(If you look closely at the photo, which I'm sure you won't, you will see that I've left the shrink-wrap covers on five of the six 'author' copies. Just for the moment, I'm keeping them pristine...)

With each new edition, I worry about the acceleration that seems to be happening. After the first edition in 1996, we managed 8 years before enough had changed to prompt the second edition. But the end of the 20th century and the start of the 21st century has not been kind to authors of books on electronic music, and the vast changes resulted in this third edition after only 4 years. This is a majorly worrying trend for me as an author, because it suggests that either the time between each book is decreasing at 4 years per edition, in which case I need to be writing the next edition now, or else it means that the time between each book halves each time, in which case I need to be writing the next edition pretty soon.

Actually, I'm inclined to think that the major disruption of the changeover from physical to virtual, from hardware to software, has now happened, and so we may have a period of relative stability for maybe 4 years. Of course, this may just be wishful thinking, in which case I may be getting busy again very soon. 'Fourth edition' does sound very imposing, though. Posh suit for the author photo for that one, perhaps?

The web-page at Elsevier / Focal Press does give away something else I have been working on recently. I've been very occupied being the Technology Evangelist for a startup company called Real Time Content. Spun out from research that I led at BT, this new company does amazing things with video. Feel free to take a look...