Current Dissertation Draft may be found here.

This directory contains audio, animation, and code pointers relevant to the dissertation.

It is broken up by chapters (ordering and naming may lag edits to the document). The media is loaded on-demand; you may load clips individually, or click the link titled "Add all players for section" to load all the media for that chapter at once.

This page does require JavaScript to be enabled to generate audio links and players; please mail if you'd prefer a static version.

For questions or comments, please mail any of:

  • travissk@ccrma.stanford.edu
  • travisskare@gmail.com

Thank you!

-Travis

Videos

Chapter 1: Introduction

(No Media)

Chapter 2: Drum Performance and Physics

Cymbal Samples:

10" A Custom Splash Sample
16" HHX Evolution Crash Sample
16" HHX Evolution Crash Sample 2 (different physical cymbal and setup)

Drum effect samples:

Tom pitch dive

Chapters 3 and 4: Synthesis Methods and Extensions

Linear Modal Synthesis

Effect of Number of Modes
Basic Cymbal, 500 Modes
Basic Cymbal, 2500 Modes

Psychoacoustic Mode Reduction with Critical Bands
Psychoacoustically-informed mode selection

You'll hear four sounds: baseline 2000 Modes, 690 modes (top-N), baseline 2000 Modes again, 690 modes chosen at maximum 35 per critical band.

Modal Effects

Note: these all affect a linear modal synthesis filter bank ringing with a cymbal-like noise distribution. In particular, nonlinear attack and "bloom" effects are absent at this stage.

Effect: Envelopes: Decay Rate Adjustment
--

Effect: Dynamic Adjustment/Tilt EQ
Unaffected, High emphasis, Low emphasis

Effect: Distortion via clippers at output

Unmodified filter bank, followed by applied effect, demonstrating challenges of this approach.

Distortion at Output

Effect: Shimmer Approximation
Shimmer Simulation

Unmodified filter bank, followed by applied effect, followed by exaggerated effect.

Effect: Low-frequency modulation
Cymbal movement on stand simulation

Unmodified filter bank, followed by applied effect.

Nonlinear Simulations: Regimes as Multiple Levels

Linear modes in isolation
+Chaotic modes in isolation
Result Stepped Assignment

Digital Waveguide Mesh Animations

The following are animation .mp4 files for:

1D Digital Waveguide network, algorithmic fit

This sound example will be updated
30 1D waveguides
30 1D waveguides, timestretched

Nonlinear Simulations: Modal Coupling

Transfer to high energy modes of a filter bank

Hi-hat articulations

Modal filterbank hi-hat choke

2D DWGM Extensions

Core Sound Examples
Varying edge-allpasses
Pitch down via increased impedance (1 output)
Increased impedance tangential to introduced "bar", much more subtle (1 output)
Pitch LFO modulation @3Hz via increased impedance (1 output)
Experiment: edge-clipper
Pitch-down with three output taps (note: slightly larger mesh vs original)
Pitch-vibrato effect with three output taps
Additional Sound Examples
Note: the following use a different setup from the above (e.g. mesh size differs)
Experiment: inner noise, basic
Experiment: inner noise, edge of stable

Chapter 5: GPU Acceleration

See Appendix B for filter bank and related code.

Chapter 6: Conclusion

(No Media)

Appendix A

(No media)

Appendix B

Source: GitLab

The best starting point is the simplified modal filter bank kernel: link

This can replace the kernel.cu in several CUDA Toolkit examples, and on Windows or Linux provides the basis for a black-box modal filter bank process on the machine. The "client responsibilites" (how to communicate with the process) are covered in the appendix. Parameters for maximum number of modes, for example, may be adjusted with compile-time constants in this example.
TODO - upload+link the JACK-based GPU synthesis application. Likely must be GPL v2 licensed as it uses some code from the sample JACK server.
TODO - upload+link MacOS Metal sample.

Appendix C

CymbalVerb Demo

Demo loop

Dry drum loop, followed by effected drum loop, with pitch shift then stretch modifiers, then lengthening/shortening tail.

Appendix E: Applied Machine Learning

This Appendix currently links to items in other chapters.
GAN samples may be found on the prior, outdated dissertation media page, Chapter 6..

Appendix F

The cymbal dataset may be downloaded in the following format(s):
Physical microphone channels, mono wav, 44.1KHz
(2.3GB download, expands to 4.7GB on disk)
12 channels * several crash and ride cymbals at different velocities.
Crashes are separated by velocity and named {CymbalType_Crash_VelocityLevel_Channel}.
Bell strikes and mallet strikes/washes are contained in separate files.