Before entering into the main development of this book, it is worth stepping back to get a larger picture of the history of digital sound synthesis. It is, of course, impossible to present a complete treatment of all that has come before, and unnecessary, considering that there are several books which cover the classical core of such techniques in great detail; those of Moore [146], Dodge and Jerse [68], Roads [174] and Miranda [145] and the collections of Roads et al. [175] Roads and Strawn [176] and DePoli et al. [65] are perhaps the best known. For a more technical viewpoint, see the report of Tolonen et al. [219], the online text of Puckette [165], and, for physical modeling techniques, the review article of Välimäki et al. [230]. This chapter is intended to give the reader a basic familiarity with the development of such methods, and some of the topics will be examined in much more detail later in this book. Indeed, many of the earlier developments are perceptually intuitive, and involve only basic mathematics; this is less so in the case of more recent work, but every effort will be made to keep the technical in this chapter to a bare minimum.
It is convenient to make a distinction between earlier, or abstract digital sound synthesis methods, discussed in §1.1 and those built around physical modeling principles, as detailed in §1.2. (Other, more elaborate taxonomies have been proposed [203,219], but the above is sufficient for the present purposes.) That this distinction is perhaps less clear-cut than it is often made out to be is a matter worthy of discussion--see §1.3, where some more general comments on the physical modeling sound synthesis are offered, namely regarding the relationship among the various physical modeling methodologies and with earlier techniques, the fundamental limitations of computational complexity in physical modeling sound synthesis, and, its suitability as a synthesis method.
In Figure 1.1, for the sake of reference, a timeline showing the development of digital sound synthesis methods is presented; dates are necessarily approximate. For brevity, only those techniques which can be related to physical modeling sound synthesis are noted--this is surely a matter a great debate, but the line must be drawn somewhere.