CCRMA Summer Workshop
Digital Signal Processing for Audio: Spectral and Physical Models (at Stanford University)

Perry Cook, Xavier Serra

This course covers analysis and synthesis of sounds based on spectral and physical models. Models and methods for synthesizing real-world sounds as well as musical sounds are presented. The course is organized into morning lectures covering theoretical aspects of the models, and afternoon labs. The morning lectures present topics such as Fourier theory, spectrum analysis, the phase vocoder, digital waveguides, digital filter theory, pitch detection, linear predictive coding (LPC), high-level feature extraction, and various other aspects of signal processing of interest in sound applications.

The afternoon labs are hands-on sessions using an implementation of SMS in Matlab, a recently developed set of libraries in C++ called CLAM, the Synthesis ToolKit (STK) in C++, and other software systems and utilities. Familiarity with engineering, mathematics, physics, and programming is a plus, but the lectures and labs are geared to a musical audience with basic experience in math and science. Most of the programs used in the workshop are available to take home.

Given the short duration of the workshop and the broad spectrum of topics to cover, the lectures are necessarily fairly high level in nature. However, a full complement of in-depth readings will be provided for those who wish to investigate the details of the material. Also, the last two days of the workshop include a more detailed treatment of some advanced topics and the corresponding afternoon labs give the students a chance to solve some specific problems of their interest.