Research Seminars

Intelligence? It is already in the sound!

Vincent Verfaille

Wednesday 29 July 2009, 14:00, Room 105

Abstract

Digital audio effects (DAFx) are digital signal processing units that are used to transform some properties of digital sound, both for creative and production purposes. The development of new DAFx as well as the refinement of existing DAFx can rely on at least one of the two following attitudes that are widely using in the community: (i) goal-oriented: look for or design specific technical solutions in order to obtain a pre-defined and well-calibrated aesthetic results (e.g., time-scaling that preserves both the attack quality and vibrato), or (ii) exploratory: pervert a technique to explore creative sound transformations.

This talk will present the exploration of means of control of DAFx using this second approach. As means of control, we will consider the adaptive control of effect-also called content-based, feature- driven, or intelligent control-, where some sound descriptors are computed to derive the audio effect control parameters. A possible set of sound descriptors related to the five perceptual attributes (loudness, pitch, duration, spatial information, timbre) will be presented. Then, for each one of various audio effects modifying at least one perceptual attribute, the signal processing technique will be detailed and sound examples will be played to the audience. Finally, a general mapping strategy will be proposed, that maps both gesture and sound descriptors to effect control parameters.

Biography

After a mathematics education at the Institut National des Sciences Appliquées, Toulouse, France, Vincent Verfaille received a Ph.D. degree in Music Technology (ATIAM: Acoustics, Signal Processing and Computer Science Applied to Music) from the Aix-Marseille II University (Université de Provence), Marseille, France, in 2003. He worked on the design and mapping strategies for the adaptive and gestural control of digital audio effects. Thereafter he completed a three year post-doc on the gestural control of sound synthesis at the Music Technology Area, in the Schulich School of Music of McGill University, Montreal, Canada. From then, he worked as a post-doc and then as a research associate on the sonification of musicians' ancillary gestures, and more recently on the indirect acquisition of musicians' gestures, i.e. the analysis of gesture through sound analysis. As of June 2009, Vincent is a freelance researcher working in the area of audio analysis and processing.