I have always liked listening to music. In high school, I started wondering how it is that music seems to be so universally pleasing, and how it differs from other kinds of sounds and noises. I started learning to play guitar, and later at the University of Trieste, I learned about acoustics and signal processing. I picked up the guitar in high school, but once I began learning to program, the idea of being able to create and process any sound using a computer was liberating. I didn't need to buy expensive and esoteric gear; I just needed to write some (or a lot!) of code. There are many programming languages that focus on music and sound, but complex operations (such as sampling a number from a special distribution, or the simulation of random processes) often require a lot of effort. That's why the audio capabilities in the Wolfram Language are special: the ability to deal with audio objects is combined with all the knowledge and computational power of the Wolfram Language! First, we needed a brand-new atomic object in the language: the Audio object.