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Syllabus: Weekly Content

This document outlines the syllabus for an online course on audio signal processing. The 10-week course covers topics such as the discrete Fourier transform, short-time Fourier transform, sinusoidal modeling, and sound transformations. Each week includes video lectures on theory, demonstrations of tools, programming exercises in Python, a quiz, and an assignment. The course aims to provide both theoretical knowledge and practical skills for analyzing, synthesizing, and describing audio signals using open-source software tools and content.

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27 views3 pages

Syllabus: Weekly Content

This document outlines the syllabus for an online course on audio signal processing. The 10-week course covers topics such as the discrete Fourier transform, short-time Fourier transform, sinusoidal modeling, and sound transformations. Each week includes video lectures on theory, demonstrations of tools, programming exercises in Python, a quiz, and an assignment. The course aims to provide both theoretical knowledge and practical skills for analyzing, synthesizing, and describing audio signals using open-source software tools and content.

Uploaded by

jcvoscrib
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Syllabus

Help Center

Audio signal processing is an engineering field that focuses on the computational methods for intentionally
altering sounds, methods that are used in many musical applications.
We have put together a course that should be of interest and accessible to people coming from diverse
backgrounds, while going deep into several signal processing topics. We focus on the spectral processing
techniques of relevance for the description and transformation of sounds, developing the basic theoretical
and practical knowledge with which to analyze, synthesize, transform and describe audio signals in the
context of music applications.
The course is based on open software and content. The demonstrations and programming exercises are
done using Python under Ubuntu, and the references and materials for the course come from open online
repositories. We are also distributing with open licenses the software and materials developed for the
course.

Weekly content
Week 1 - Introduction: Introduction to the course, to the field of Audio Signal Processing, and to the
basic mathematics needed for the course. Introductory demonstrations to some of the applications and
tools to be used. Introduction to Python and to the sms-tools package, the main programming tool for
the course.
Week 2 - Discrete Fourier transform: The Discrete Fourier Transform equation; complex
exponentials; scalar product in the DFT; DFT of complex sinusoids; DFT of real sinusoids; and inverseDFT. Demonstrations on how to analyze a sound using the DFT; introduction to Freesound.org.
Implementing sinusoids and the DFT in Python.
Week 3 - Fourier transform properties: Linearity, shift, symmetry, convolution; energy conservation
and decibels; phase unwrapping; zero padding; Fast Fourier Transform and zero-phase windowing;
and analysis/synthesis. Demonstration of the analysis of simple periodic signals and of complex
sounds; demonstration of spectrum analysis tools. Implementing the computation of the spectrum of a
sound fragment using Python and presentation of the dftModel functions implemented in the sms-tools
package.
Week 4 - Short-time Fourier transform: STFT equation; analysis window; FFT size and hop size;
time-frequency compromise; inverse STFT. Demonstration of tools to compute the spectrogram of a
sound and on how to analyze a sound using them. Implementation of the windowing of sounds using
Python and presentation of the STFT functions from the sms-tools package, explaining how to use
them.
Week 5 - Sinusoidal model: Sinusoidal model equation; sinewaves in a spectrum; sinewaves as
spectral peaks; time-varying sinewaves in spectrogram; sinusoidal synthesis. Demonstration of the
sinusoidal model interface of the sms-tools package and its use in the analysis and synthesis of
sounds. Implementation of the detection of spectral peaks and of the sinusoidal synthesis using Python
and presentation of the sineModel functions from the sms-tools package, explaining how to use them.
Week 6 - Harmonic model: Harmonic model equation; sinusoids-partials-harmonics; polyphonicmonophonic signals; harmonic detection; f0-detection in time and frequency domains. Demonstrations

of pitch detection algorithm, of the harmonic model interface of the sms-tools package and of its use in
the analysis of sounds. Implementation of the detection of the fundamental frequency in the frequency
domain using the TWM algorithm in Python and presentation of the harmonicModel functions from the
sms-tools package, explaining how to use them.
Week 7 - Sinusoidal plus residual modeling: Stochastic signals; stochastic model; stochastic
approximation of sounds; sinusoidal/harmonic plus residual model; residual subtraction;
sinusoidal/harmonic plus stochastic model; stochastic model of residual. Demonstrations of the
stochastic model, harmonic plus residual, and harmonic plus stochastic interfaces of the sms-tools
package and of its use in the analysis and synthesis of sounds. Presentation of the stochasticModel,
hprModel and hpsModel functions implemented in the sms-tools package, explaining how to use them.
Week 8 - Sound transformations: Filtering and morphing using the short-time Fourier transform;
frequency and time scaling using the sinusoidal model; frequency transformations using the harmonic
plus residual model; time scaling and morphing using the harmonic plus stochastic model.
Demonstrations of the various transformation interfaces of the sms-tools package and of Audacity.
Presentation of the stftTransformations, sineTransformations and hpsTransformations functions
implemented in the sms-tools package, explaining how to use them.
Week 9 - Sound/music description: Extraction of audio features using spectral analysis methods;
describing sounds, sound collections, music recordings and music collections; clustering and
classification of sounds. Demonstration of various plugins from SonicVisualiser to describe sound and
music signals, and of some advance features of freesound.org. Presentation of Essentia, a C++ library
for sound and music description, explaining how to use it from Python. Programming with the
Freesound API in Python to download sound collections and to study them.
Week 10 - Concluding topics: Audio signal processing beyond this course. Beyond audio signal
processing. Review of the course topics. Where to learn more about the topics of this course.
Presentation of MTG-UPF. Demonstration of Dunya (http://dunya.compmusic.upf.edu/) a web browser
to explore several audio music collections. Presentation of AcousticBrainz (http://acousticbrainz.org/), a
project that aims to crowd source acoustic information for all music in the world.

References
The main software tools used are in https://github.com/MTG/sms-tools and the sounds to be studied come
from https://freesound.org. Most of the external references come from Julius O Smith
website, https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~jos, or from https://www.wikipedia.org.

Course format
Each week is structured around six types of activities:
Theory: video lectures covering the core signal processing concepts.
Demos: video lectures presenting tools and examples that complement the theory.
Programming: video lectures presenting the needed programming skills (using Python) to implement
the techniques described in the theory.
Quiz: questionnaire to review the concepts covered.
Assignment: programming exercises to implement and use the methodologies presented.
Advanced topics: videos and written documents that extend the topics covered.

Created Mon 25 Feb 2013 8:18 PM PET


Last Modified Sat 29 Nov 2014 6:24 AM PET

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