Just a little time ago, half a century ago, arrangers and composers wrote scores with the help of a pencil and music paper. Then computers appeared. At present, practically no composer, especially the one working in the “light” genre, cannot (or, more exactly, doesn’t want to) do without an electronic “orchestra substitution”. But, unfortunately, everything that is new takes root with difficulties in Russia, and musical educational institutions don’t teach how to work with a computer. This article is written for the people who want to work with computer sound but unfortunately know nothing on the subject.

Surely, each of you heard the term midi during conversations, in the Internet, on TV or somewhere else. In any case, all computer music (I mean not the style of work, but performance: we may define as “computer music” both a dancing song and a classical arrangement performed on PC) is based on the use of midi-commands. Roughly speaking, we use Midi sequence of numerical commands transmitted to the device for their further transformation and replay.

The easiest example is pressing the key of any synthesizer. Here, a sound reproduction command is transmitted to the sound module (it is the same as a sound card in a computer), which communicates the digital value of the key pressed (each note has a certain binary code, and when the sound module receives it, it plays a pre-programmed sound of a certain pitch), the speed of pressing — Velocity (depending on which the sound is played with a certain volume) and, finally, when you release the key, a command about the end of replay appears. This moment is clear, but this is just the beginning. What commands does the sound card receive when it replays, for example, a rock composition recorded on a disc? It brings us to the next topic.

Having realized the main processes that happen during signal digitization, we may come to the description of software created for the work with digital sound. Special programs called audio editors were created for convenient sound processing. These programs have a convenient interface (appearance) which allows to manage digitization, and the recorded signal is shown as a time to volume dependence diagram. This presentation simplifies the task of sound processing as you have a possibility to work “in the unreal” time with precision which is difficult to perceive by ear, let alone correct it.