392160 Sonification and Sound Synthesis (V) (SoSe 2016)

Sound is a ubiquitous component in our physical environments: each physical interaction
creates an acoustic reaction and we also use sound for communication (speech, music).
In contrast, the digital worlds are inherently silent and our listening capabilities is neglected when it comes to investigate data.

In this lecture we first investigate, what sound is, how it works in the real world (acoustics), how we process audio signals (psychoacoustics), and then in more detail, how we can compute sound signals (sound synthesis). Standard approaches such as additive/subtractive synthesis, granular synthesis, FM-synthesis and nonlinear synthesis will be covered.

These techniques can then be used in turn to also represent data sets by using sound,
which is called Sonification within Auditory Displays. The lecture will provide a basic introduction into the interdisciplinary research field of sonification, and show various practical application examples that illustrate how sound can be a useful component,
for exploratory data analysis, for visually impaired users, for ambient information systems, etc.

Participants can practically experiment with sound synthesis and sonification techniques,
using SuperCollider, the python digital signal processing system pyo, and python/scipy/matplotlib to
analyze data.

The lecture will be offered as part of the module 'Ambient Intelligence and Auditory Interfaces' from next year on. Students can have their credit points then registered as part of the module if wished.

Bibliography

The sonification handbook (http://sonification.de/handbook)