School of Audio Engineering
Location: London UK
Date: July-September 2008
Organisers: SAE Institute, 297 Kingsland Road, London, E8 4DD, Phone: 0845-301 11 33
Supervisor: Mathias Postel
Tutor: Andy Farnell
Assistant(s): Darren Gash, Paul Weir
Duration: 20 hours, 10 lectures x 2 hours
Student places: 32
We discuss:
Practical demands of sound design for interaction, ringtones, alarms, product sounds, game audio and so forth.
Listening strategies, perception, attention, schemas, sound cognition.
Sound meaning, semantics, signalling space, noise vs signal in environment, informative sounds.
Roles of interactive sound design in various media; film, game, radio, installation, product.
High level view of interactive system, audio engine, control layer, I/O system, state/action model, real-time controllers.
Materials
We discuss:
Review of previous lecture, psychoacoustics, context, interactive systems.
Building simple patches. Objects, messages, floats, arithmetic, lists, evaluation order, message delays, metro, counters, cycles and modulo, arrays and graphs.
Audio domain objects, blocks. The accumulator. Wrapping and periodic functions, phasor, cosinusoidal function, lines and envelopes, subpatching.
Example exercise - telephone signalling sounds. Dialling tone, ringing tone, busy tone, DTMF, handset and line as filter system, transfers and impulse responses, table lookup.
Random numbers, Example - beetle race, roulette, random music.
Materials
We discuss:
Review of previous lecture, randoms, timebases, sequencing messages, random melody etc.
Noise, distribution, critical bands,
Filters, feedback, unit delay, phase unit circle, lowpass, highpass, bandpass, noise colours, uses in sound design.
Shaping. Square, triangle and other waveshapes, bandlimiting, shifting, scaling.
Simple MIDI examples, synth, VCF, envelope, note velocity processing.
Interactive Sound Design exercise I: Fire. Physical analysis, spectral analysis, composites and extents, volumetric vs point sources, causailty. Fire components, crackle, spits, hissing, roaring. Synthetic fire design.
Materials
PDF and Pd code for computer music composition exercise.
Main Page