The more I get into PD the more I feel like I need to understand the mathematics of what is going on i.e. terminology like "analysis is Hanning windowed" makes absolutely no sense to moi.

Is there an intro to DSP that people on the forum found helpful?

thanks in advance for any suggestions.

personally, i've been writing patches in pd for a few years and never really needed much maths beyond simple arithmetic and sine wave geometry. your example, 'hanning window' if you open up the hanning array, you will see it's just a simple cosine wave raised up and scaled so that it goes from 0 to 1 instead of -1 to 1.

don't let me discourage you from learning more maths, as it probably would be useful;...but just saying that you can get by ok without worrying too much.

As Hardoff says, you can get a long way without needing any math at all. Maths is just a helper, a language to visualise other complicated ideas with.

I suggest Steven E Smiths "Scientist and Engineers guide to DSP"

http://www.dspguide.com/

The (almost complete) PDF is avilable free online, but I'm sure after reading it you'l want to get the paperback version. It's nicely written, introduces concepts in the right order and doesn't really use much math.

Level 1 study also includes:

1. Dodge and Jerse "Computer Music" - expensive hardback but fundamental
2. Miranda "Computer Sound Design" - easy going and general
3. Roads "The Computer Music Tutorial" - extensive

Level 2 study is

1. Miller Puckettes book "Theory and techniques"
2. Julius Smiths pages on filters, waveguides and modelling
3. Dave Benson "Music, a mathematical offering"
4. Perry Cook "Real time sound synthesis"

Thanks to both of you.
Will start to slowly dig into the DSP book.
and, yes... I think that I do get a bit freaked out by fancy naming conventions for no good reason