The Sound Manifesto

Computing practice today depends on visual output to drive almost all user interaction. Other senses, such as audition, may be totally neglected, or used tangentially, or used in highly restricted specialized ways. We have excellent audio rendering through D-A conversion, but we lack rich general facilities for modeling and manipulating sound comparable in quality and flexibility to graphics. We need co-ordinated research in several disciplines to improve the use of sound as an interactive information channel. Incremental and separate improvements in synthesis, analysis, speech processing, audiology, acoustics, music, etc. will not alone produce the radical progress that we seek in sonic practice. We also need to create a new central topic of study in digital audio research. The new topic will assimilate the contributions of different disciplines on a common foundation. The key central concept that we lack is sound as a general-purpose information channel. We must investigate the structure of this information channel, which is driven by the co-operative development of auditory perception and physical sound production. Particular audible encodings, such as speech and music, illuminate sonic information by example, but they are no more sufficient for a characterization than typography is sufficient for a characterization of visual information.Comment: To appear in the conference on Critical Technologies for the Future of Computing, part of SPIE's International Symposium on Optical Science and Technology, 30 July to 4 August 2000, San Diego, C

Perceptually smooth timbral guides by state-space analysis of phase-vocoder parameters

Sculptor is a phase-vocoder-based package of programs that allows users to explore timbral manipulation of sound in real time. It is the product of a research program seeking ultimately to perform gestural capture by analysis of the sound a performer makes using a conventional instrument. Since the phase-vocoder output is of high dimensionality — typically more than 1,000 channels per analysis frame—mapping phase-vocoder output to appropriate input parameters for a synthesizer is only feasible in theory

Graph Spectral Image Processing

Recent advent of graph signal processing (GSP) has spurred intensive studies of signals that live naturally on irregular data kernels described by graphs (e.g., social networks, wireless sensor networks). Though a digital image contains pixels that reside on a regularly sampled 2D grid, if one can design an appropriate underlying graph connecting pixels with weights that reflect the image structure, then one can interpret the image (or image patch) as a signal on a graph, and apply GSP tools for processing and analysis of the signal in graph spectral domain. In this article, we overview recent graph spectral techniques in GSP specifically for image / video processing. The topics covered include image compression, image restoration, image filtering and image segmentation

A simplified and controllable model of mode coupling for addressing nonlinear phenomena in sound synthesis processes

This paper introduces a simplified and controllable model for mode coupling in the context of modal synthesis. The model employs efficient coupled filters for sound synthesis purposes, intended to emulate the generation of sounds radiated by sources under strongly nonlinear conditions. Such filters generate tonal components in an interdependent way and are intended to emulate realistic perceptually salient effects in musical instruments in an efficient manner. The control of energy transfer between the filters is realized through a coupling matrix. The generation of prototypical sounds corresponding to nonlinear sources with the filter bank is presented. In particular, examples are proposed to generate sounds corresponding to impacts on thin structures and to the perturbation of the vibration of objects when it collides with an other object. The sound examples presented in the paper and available for listening on the accompanying site illustrate that a simple control of the input parameters allows the generation of sounds whose evocation is coherent and that the addition of random processes yields a significant improvement to the realism of the generated sounds

Aeronautical Engineering. A continuing bibliography with indexes, supplement 156

This bibliography lists 288 reports, articles and other documents introduced into the NASA scientific and technical information system in December 1982

Intuitive control of rolling sound synthesis

International audienceThis paper presents a rolling sound synthesis model which can be intuitively controlled. To propose this model, different aspects of the rolling phenomenon are explored : physical modeling, perceptual attributes and signal morphology. A source-filter model for rolling sounds synthesis is presented with associated intuitive controls