CCRMA

Winter 2004

220b: Synthesis Techniques, Compositional Algorithms, Psychoacoustics and Spatial Processing


* Course Description

This is the second course in the 220 series. It covers some basic sound synthesis techniques not covered last quarter (see 220a), algorithmic composition techniques, spatialization and some psychoacoustics. The course uses the CLM-2 (Common Lisp Music) environment to create all sound examples and the Common Lisp programming language (in which clm-2 itself is implemented) for all programming examples.

Common Lisp Music (CLM) is a public domain sound design language written on top of Common Lisp, currently running in Macintosh PowerPCs, Windows and several UNIX environments including SGI, Sun, NeXT and Linux.

Evaluation consists of 4 assignments and a final project. Each assignment builds on the knowledge of the previous one, and the final outcome is a final project which is usually a computer music composition. This project is going to be presented during the finals week.

Assignment submission track sheet


 

* Lectures


Week Tue
Thu
Topic goal Assignment
JAN 1 6 Lisp, xemacs, clm, intro to cellular automatas... 8 modulation synthesis; cellular automatas Introduction Ia (5%) sound check, due Thursday Jan 8 at sunset
Ib (10%) synthesis and automatas - due Friday 23 at sunset

2 13 Modulation Synthesis 15 more on Modulation Synthesis II (10%)

3 20 Granular Synthesis, sampling rate conversion 22

4 27 Common Music Patterns 29 III (15%)
FEB 5 03 Spatialization 05

6 10 12 Chaos, Fractals IV (20%)

7 17 Digital Filters, Substractive Synthesis 19

8 24 Physical Modelling
26

Final Project (40%) - presentation 3 weeks later
MAR 9 02 ATS, resynthesis
04



10 9 11 Wrap-up


11 16 final's 18 week Presentation

Main topics that will be covered...

Additive synthesis, Modulation Synthesis, Physical Modeling, Digital Filters and Substractive Synthesis. Spatialization techniques, VBAP, HRTF, Reverberation models. Random processes, State machines, Cellular automatas, Chaos, Fractals (applied to algorithmic composition).

Supplementary information and links (Winter 2001), by Chris Burns.


Suplementary texts

* Elements of Computer Music
F. Richard Moore, Prentice Hall, 1990
* The Computer Music Tutorial
Curtis Road, MIT press, 1996
* Musical Sound
John Pierce, Scientific American Books, 1990
* Computer Music: Synthesis, Composition and Performance
Charles Dodge and Thomas Jerse, Schirmer Books, New York, 1985

* Administrative Information

Music 220b meets Tuesdays and Thursdays 10:15am to 11:45am. Winter quarter only, in the Ballroom at CCRMA. The course can only be taken for 4 (four) units.


©2001-2004 Fernando Lopez-Lezcano. All Rights Reserved.
nando@ccrma.stanford.edu