The chapters are generally organized as a series of ``theory'' and ``application'' chapters, working up from delay effects through virtual musical instruments. The purpose of mixing theory and application is to put useful techniques to work soon after they are covered, instead of spending forever in preliminaries before getting to musically interesting applications. Thus, for example, acoustic modeling with delay is followed by artificial reverberation, delay-line interpolation is followed by time-varying delay effects, and so on.
The style of the chapters is relatively concise and bottom-line oriented, with more detailed coverage deferred to the appendices when reasonable. In the Web version, many technical terms are linked to associated tutorials (and this work is ongoing). All software examples in the text are freely available, and perhaps most easily obtained via copy/paste from the Web version.
For class use, the design is approximately one chapter per week,
spanning a quarter.
There is a significant rise in difficulty level when
``lumped models'' are reached, presumably due to the use of complex
impedances in the Laplace and/or
domains. Extra time should be
allowed to practice problems such as a point-mass
colliding with an ideal string (§9.3.1). For a semester
course, one could include more material on digitizing differential
equations, such as in the appendices regarding finite difference
schemes and/or wave digital filters. Alternatively, one could expand
the final chapter entitled Virtual Musical Instruments to include more
case studies.