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E6820 Assignment 6
Reading
assignment
Paper:
“Synthesizing auditory icons” William W. Gaver,
InterChi’93
Summary:
Gaver discusses how you can parameterize certain sounds that might be
useful as auditory icons. He discusses impacts, breaks,
bouncing, spilling, scraping, and machine sounds. Impacts are
synthesized in terms of partial frequencies, initial amplitudes of
those frequencies, and sampling of the frequencies over time.
Once you have impacts, synthesizing breaks and bouncing simply
involves synthesizing multiple impacts. Broadly, scraping was
modeled by the resonant frequencies of the thing being scraped through
a filter. Machine sounds were modeled as repetitive complex waves.
Thoughts:
I would like to hear some of these synthesized sounds. It
certainly is an interesting idea that you can parameterize sounds
sufficiently to recreate them accurately. That being said, I hate
it when my computer makes noises without my direct command. I
find sounds distracting and intrusive when I'm working on a computer.
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Practical
assignment
(a) Here are the tracks:
(b) It looks as though F0 for the first note is about 200 Hz:
(c) Here is the re-synthesized
first note. The highest overtone in the original file was about
1650 Hz. Translated up two half steps, the overtone should be at
about 1850 Hz, so the spectrogram looks good.
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Project
Work on the project can be found on my project page here.
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Christine Smit
