CSC354 - Seminar on Digital Sound and Music Processing

Instructor - Judy A. Franklin
Textbook: The Computer Music Tutorial, by Curtis Roads, MIT Press, 1996

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• The Digital Sound and Music Processing course focuses on areas of computer-based sound/music manipulation that overlap significantly with computer science disciplines. The sources for course material are a tutorial textbook, supplemented in parallel with research papers that are presented by students in a seminar format. One part of the course is digital manipulation of sound that covers a tutorial on sound, sound file formats, compression techniques, and sound synthesis by software. Secondly, formal representations are included, meaning the use of computer science's formal models of machines and languages (grammars) to analyze and to generate sound and music. Thirdly, many algorithms and techniques from the computer science field of artificial intelligence have been and continue to be applied to music composition as well as music database retrieval (e.g. neural networks, cellular automata, hidden markov models, expert systems, etc.). Fourthly, time-dependent constraints for sound and music processing systems are important for generation, real-time analysis, and real-time interaction. Time-dependence and synchronization requirements will be examined from the algorithmic and operating system perspectives. We also study the history of computer music and its evolution with computing hardware, thus encompassing a glimpse at the history of computing itself. Students will work on small programming projects as well as several large projects. A final project includes a demonstration or installation.
• Prerequisites are CSC 111, 112 and either 231 or 250. Knowledge of sound and music is not required, though an interest is.