Theory and Technique of Electronic Music

Having gotten PD to hear MIDI from my keyboard and play my very simple patch, my next thought was to figure out how to get polyphony out of PD.

PD is a pretty low-level softsynth. It gives you the basics, like oscillators and D/A converters, but beyond that, you wire them up to suit your needs. Kinda like being given a box of tubes, resistors and capacitors and being told you can build your own stereo. Hence my need to "figure out polyphony". I'm doing so because a) once you figure it out (and it doesn't look to be that hard, really), you can do pretty much anything you want, and b) I'm a geek.

So my next step was to dust off (figuratively speaking) my copy of TTEM, known also as "The Theory and Technique of Electronic Music", by Miller Puckette. On the one hand, TTEM is (if not "over my head") a lot of complex stuff about synthesizing sound, but wrapped around the math and theory is explanations of how to do stuff with PD. Like sampling, reverb and polyphony.

Having read TTEM pretty much cover to cover a year or so ago, I'm just skimming over things, and heading for the practical, and this morning, I stopped and got halfway through understanding example 3.16, which looks like a more complete MIDI patch.