DST II: Advanced Topics in Audio Signal Processing


Description
Syllabus
Other Materials

Catalog Description

Advanced training in standard digital signal processing techniques for audio and music processing. Topics include filters, delay lines, additive and subtractive synthesis and modulation techniques. The course is organized in seminar-style lectures, where the theory will be reviewed. These will be complemented with MATLAB-based assignments.

Summary

The course is intended to provide students with advanced training in standard digital signal processing techniques for audio and music processing. This knowledge forms the basis of applications in digital audio effects, audio analysis, and sound synthesis, and is relevant to the music generation, processing, recording, reproduction, and distribution industries, to name but a few examples. The course is organized in seminar-style lectures, where the theory will be reviewed.

Instructor

Matthew D. Hoffman
mhoffman [at] nyu.edu

Time and Location

Thursday 6:45-8:25 P.M.
ITS Multimedia Center
35 West 4th Street, 2nd Floor

Prerequisites

Digital signal theory I

Assessment

Students will be assessed based on six (approximately) biweekly assignments each worth 10% of the final grade, and on one final project accounting for the other 40%. Each assignment will typically involve some MATLAB programming as well as a creative component where students will be asked to produce a short musical statement using recently covered techniques.

Recommended Reading

There is no official required text for the course, but students may find the following books useful.

Most of the material in this course is covered in the DAFX book.

A good, rigorous, accessible audio-focused introduction to DSP is Ken Steiglitz's Digital Signal Processing Primer.

Julius Smith's webpage has pretty much everything one could hope to know about digital filters, the discrete Fourier transform, and a host of other topics having to do with digital audio and signal processing. And it's all available online for free! (Note that "pretty much everything" includes a lot of math. But Smith's books are written in a way that assumes very little previous mathematical background, as long as you're willing to learn some notation and start at the beginning.)

Curtis Roads's Computer Music Tutorial is a nice (and enormous) reference to have around.

Perry Cook's Real Sound Synthesis book is a good resource for those interested in synthesis, with a particular emphasis on physical modeling and the physics of sound generation in the real (as in physical) world.

Additional readings will be distributed in class.