Proceedings

Keynote 1: Peter Balazs - Frames in Audio Processing: What You Use, but Might Not Know

Given a certain number of sampling points, can it be useful to represent them with a larger collection of points/values? If not, why are spectrograms usually using overlapping windows? Given a particular analysis filter bank, when and how can a synthesis procedure be found that enables perfect reconstruction? What are the conditions for that? Is a quadrature-mirror condition the only way? How can a time-varying filter be implemented by directly manipulating the time-frequency coefficients? What properties do such time-frequency filters have? All those (and similar) questions will be answered by using the theory of frames and its application to audio signal processing.

Note: use DAFx16 Wireless Guest Access password to open the presentation.

Keynote 2: Michael Hlatky - Design at Native Instruments

Since Native Instruments introduced Generator, the first modular synthesizer for a desktop computer environment more 20 years ago, the company has released a large variety of hardware and software to perform and produce music. This talk will give an insight into how we - the people working at NI - design the hardware, develop the software, decide upon features and what lessons we learned.

Keynote 3: Sakari Tervo - Parametric Spatial Room Impulse Response Analysis and Synthesis: A High-Resolution Approach

The analysis of room acoustics is of great interest in subjective and objective studies of acoustic spaces. Often, the goal in room acoustic studies is to explain the subjective experience of sound, for example, speech clarity or bassiness, with the objective measurements of the sound field. In order to describe a sound field spatially, a microphone array impulse response measurement is required. This keynote lecture presents an approach to the analysis and synthesis of the sound field measured with a microphone array via parametric models. Estimation methods of the parameters in the model, and the detection of which model fits the data the best are described. Pros and cons of the parametric approach are discussed and examples with some commercially available microphone arrays are described.

Tutorial 1: Václav Peloušek & Lennart Schierling - Instrument Design Upside Down with Bastl Instruments

Emulating inherently digital artefacts with analog technology? Sounds created by running sound processing on processors virtually unable to render them? This Bastl [local term for hack] mindset as a design approach for musical instruments and tools has been the key for Bastl Instruments main developer Václav Peloušek to creating a range of desktop hardware instruments and eurorack modules. Analog and digital circuits running at the edge of collapse to work in harmony as part of digital-analog-mechanical hybrid systems. Lennart Schierling is the main developer of Thyme - robot operated digital tape machine - very universal sequencable hardware DSP processing unit to be released soon by Bastl.

Tutorial 2: Jaromír Mačák - Analog Effects Modeling - New Ways to Get Old Sounds

The term virtual analog effects has been known in digital audio effects community for several years. But until recently, this type of audio effects have been accepted by a wider range of musicians and end users as adequate equivalent to classic analog audio effects. This is due to a significant improvement of the methods and algorithms for real-time digital simulation of analog circuits. This tutorial will give an overview of basic techniques used in virtual analog modeling based either on deep analysis of the circuit schematic or measurement of analog audio effect. Pros and cons of both approaches will be mentioned as well as real examples using these techniques with attention for real-time implementation of these algorithms.

Tutorial 3: Jukka Pätynen & Sakari Tervo - Detailed Analysis of Room Acoustics by Spatiotemporal Methods

The analysis of sound fields in rooms has been under interest for a long time. Many traditional methods aim to describe the room-acoustic effect in terms of single number values. However, numeric parameters often fail in communicating the multi-dimensional effects. The introduction of compact microphone arrays have enabled an increasingly detailed analysis of the sound field. This tutorial will present the latest advances in investigating the spatial, spectral, and temporal structure of the acoustics of enclosures with visual techniques. These methods are demonstrated with a recently published, freely available analysis toolbox.