MUSIC SIGNAL PROCESSING

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Course outline

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Columbia Courseworks E4896

Announcements

2012-01-17

First lecture is on Wednesday, Jan 18th. Our classroom is 545 Mudd.
The calendar within the E4896 Courseworks page shows the slots available to sign up for presentation. Please email the TA, Rachel, to reserve a slot as soon as possible.

General Information

Instructor:	Dan Ellis <dpwe@ee.columbia.edu> Schapiro CEPSR room 718
Instructor office hours:	Thursdays 14:00-16:00
Teaching assistants:	Rachel Kurtz <rmk2143@columbia.ed>
TA office hours:	By appointment
Text:	We won't have a single text, but we will be using parts of: DAFX: Digital Audio Effects Edited by Udo Zölzer (ISBN: 0-471-49078-4, John Wiley & Sons, 2002)
Lectures:	Mondays and Wednesdays, 11:00-12:15 545 Mudd
Credits:	3
Course web site:	http://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/e4896/

Overview

This course will survey applications of signal processing to music audio -- synthesis, effects, and analysis.

The emphasis will be on connecting the practical, intuitive effects of the techniques with the underlying signal processing principles and tools.

The class will be hands-on, with lots of practical implementations as well as presentations of current papers and our projects.

Grading structure

• Classroom participation (20%)
• One in-class presentation (20%)
• Three mini-projects (30%)
• One final project (30%)

Some points to bear in mind:

• Projects will involve programming audio effects using a software platform introduced in class: Matlab, Pd (C), or Processing (Java).
• The "class participation" portion of the grade is meant to reward and encourage engagement, but not to unfairly penalize anyone. It will reflect factors including attendance and participating in discussions but also effort and involvement in the practical activities. If you are concerned because you are uncomfortable asking questions in class, please do not worry that you will lose points. As long as we get the feeling that are genuinely involved, we will not give you a poor grade.
• If you miss a class or two, that's fine. If you know you're going to have to miss some classes because of another commitment, that's fine too, but please let us know.
• The "presentation" portion of the grade will require you to make some kind of pre-prepared presentation to the class at some point in the semester. But the grading here will be generous. Although effective communication is an essential part of an engineer's professional profile, we are not here to judge your slide-making ability, or your public speaking voice. As long as you make a sincere effort to communicate with the class, you'll do fine on this part of the grade.
• The projects are probably the part of the class that will make the biggest difference to your grade. However, we will not be judging them so much on outcome as on process: how appropriately and skillfully you applied the technical concepts from class, the overall structure, etc. We recognize that research projects don't always work out as planned, and that computers don't always behave. If you have a good story about what you tried to do, and how and why you tried to do it, you'll be fine.
• The class will not be ``curved'', meaning that an overabundance of super-performing students will not push down the grades of mere mortals. We will assign the final grades based on an absolute expectation of desired student performance. We hope that everyone will get an A!

Prerequisites

• Basic signals and systems
• Basic programming

Syllabus

See the course outline.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.
Dan Ellis <dpwe@ee.columbia.edu>
Last updated: Wed Feb 01 10:23:48 AM EST 2012