Synthesizing Sounds

For all music (and noise) lovers! Find out what it means to get entangled into the world of digital sound. The workshop is an introduction into the field, explaining fundamental principles of digital signal processing. Students with or without a musical background can enroll to see how to produce and manipulate sound on a computer. We will learn about periodic waves, aperiodic noise, pitches described in Hertz, synthesis procedures, filtering, effects and software which can make all of this happen.

Goals

• Understand digital sound and relate it to an analog world
• Produce some basic waves and start playing with them
• Interact with a sound model.

Requirements

Students have to install the last distribution of Pure Data, a not really sexy but amazing environment that can be considered as the overlord of all music software. A set of headphones might come handy :)

Project

We will make a simple sequencer that starts from basic sound fundamentals (aka waves) and is able to process that sound through keyboard interaction, synthesis and filtering.

Next Steps

• Take your journey further by reading some good books: loadBang is a start, The Theory and Technique of Electronic Music is a bit more complex.
• Find out how to make sound in a browser.
• It doesn’t need to be all complicated: Rie Nakajima