0000000000245497
AUTHOR
Stefano Baldan
Reverberation still in business: Thickening and propagating micro-textures in physics-based sound modeling
Artificial reverberation is usually introduced, as a digital audio effect, to give a sense of enclosing architectural space. In this paper we argue about the effectiveness and usefulness of diffusive reverberators in physically-inspired sound synthesis. Examples are given for the synthesis of textural sounds, as they emerge from solid mechanical interactions, as well as from aerodynamic and liquid phenomena.
Growing the practice of vocal sketching
Sketch-thinking in the design domain is a complex representational activity, emerging from the reflective conversation with the sketch. A recent line of research on computational support for sound design has been focusing on the exploitation of voice, and especially vocal imitations, as effective representation strategy for the early stage of the design process. A set of introductory exercises on vocal sketching, to probe the communication effectiveness of vocal imitations for design purposes, are presented and discussed, in the scope of the research-through-design workshop activities of the EU project SkAT-VG
Embodied sound design
Abstract Embodied sound design is a process of sound creation that involves the designer’s vocal apparatus and gestures. The possibilities of vocal sketching were investigated by means of an art installation. An artist–designer interpreted several vocal self-portraits and rendered the corresponding synthetic sketches by using physics-based and concatenative sound synthesis. Both synthesis techniques afforded a broad range of artificial sound objects, from concrete to abstract, all derived from natural vocalisations. The vocal-to-synthetic transformation process was then automated in SEeD, a tool allowing to set and play interactively with physics- or corpus-based sound models. The voice-dri…
The Sound Design Toolkit
The Sound Design Toolkit is a collection of physically informed sound synthesis models, specifically designed for practice and research in Sonic Interaction Design. The collection is based on a hierarchical, perceptually founded taxonomy of everyday sound events, and implemented by procedural audio algorithms which emphasize the role of sound as a process rather than a product. The models are intuitive to control – and the resulting sounds easy to predict – as they rely on basic everyday listening experience. Physical descriptions of sound events are intentionally simplified to emphasize the most perceptually relevant timbral features, and to reduce computational requirements as well. Keywo…
Sketching sonic interactions by imitation-driven sound synthesis
Sketching is at the core of every design activity. In visual design, pencil and paper are the preferred tools to produce sketches for their simplicity and immediacy. Analogue tools for sonic sketching do not exist yet, although voice and gesture are embodied abilities commonly exploited to communicate sound concepts. The EU project SkAT-VG aims to support vocal sketching with computeraided technologies that can be easily accessed, understood and controlled through vocal and gestural imitations. This imitation-driven sound synthesis approach is meant to overcome the ephemerality and timbral limitations of human voice and gesture, allowing to produce more refined sonic sketches and to think a…
Streams as Seams: Carving trajectories out of the time-frequency matrix
A time-frequency representation of sound is commonly obtained through the Short-Time Fourier Transform. Identifying and extracting the prominent frequency components of the spectrogram is important for sinusoidal modeling and sound processing. Borrowing a known image processing technique, known as seam carving, we propose an algorithm to track and extract the sinusoidal components from the sound spectrogram. Experiments show how this technique is well suited for sound whose prominent frequency components vary both in amplitude and in frequency. Moreover, seam carving naturally produces some auditory continuity effects. We compare this algorithm with two other sine extraction techniques, bas…