Undergraduate: 60% assignments, 40% term project.

Graduate: 40% assignments, 60% research project.

The course will provide a self contained introduction to sound processing by computer. The course will have a strong practical focus.  Students will be encouraged to explore various hardware and software platforms for audio.

This is a project based course.  Undergraduates will do a term project and complete a final report, in the area of their choice. Graduate students will take on a larger project and write it up as a research paper.

Introductory material will be covered in lectures, demonstrations, and assignments.

The course will begin with a brief introduction to human hearing, acoustics and electronics. We will then cover analog to digital and digital to analog conversion, followed by time and frequency domain analysis of signals (Fourier transform).

Given this foundation a number of practical problems will be studied, including: Sound analysis (time frequency and wavelet representation), sound synthesis (amplitude and frequency modulation) and System identification (measure frequency response of circuits, microphones, speakers).

Optional topics (lecture and/or project material) include: Digital signal processing (z-transform), audio compression (MP3), digital audio hardware and software systems, and acoustics simulation.

Lectures and assignments will be provided in Matlab (or Octave). Students may complete assignments as well as their projects on  the hardware/software of their choice.