Some of these are very powerful and high-level 'handles' on a complex waveform, some are very focused on characterizing one or another aspect of the sound. The good news is that there are a range of software apps and pd/MaxMSP objects that allow you to start using these descriptors in your work without too much difficulty.

Links

• Amadeus Sound Editor -- excellent, low-cost sound wavefrom editor; also with some limited FFT display capabilities
• Audacity Sound Editor -- another good sound editor, very popular (and free!)
• Sonic Vsiualizer -- the mother of all sound-descriptor apps, this will display virtually any audio descrtiptor you wish to see. Very powerful program
• Vamp plug-ins -- these are what give the Sonic Visualizer its capabilities. You will need them to perform the transforms on the soundfile. Many, many are available.

• Max/MSP analysis objects -- by Miller Puckette, you can find [sigmund~], [bonk~] and a few others here. The pd versions are included in the pd distribution.
• zsa.descriptors -- Max/MSP objects written by Emmanuel Jourdan for doing many of the analysis/transform operations described in last week's class by William Brent. Here are some links to papers Emmanuel wrote about the package.

• MEAPsoft -- written RIGHT HERE at Columbia! Go Lions! Bryan showed some of the capabilities of this package, will show more next week.
• SPEAR -- Michael Klingbeil's analyzer/resynthesizer. Yeah, we have it linked all over the place for this class. See below for the basic programs I wrote in class for manipulating SPEAR data.

Class Downloads

• pitch-track1.maxpat.zip -- simple Max/MSP patch using [sigmund~] to control the pitch and loudness of a happy just-tuned chord synthesized using the [rtcmix~] object.
  
  
• read-write.c -- a simple C program that reads SPEAR data (in "partials" text format) and writes it back out. Compile it with this command (in a terminal window):
  
  cc -o read-write read-write.c
  
  and then run it with this fun unix command:
  
  cat spear-partials-file.txt | read-write >& spear-modified-partials.txt
  
  This will take a file of SPEAR data (named "spear-partials-file.txt" in the above command) and produce a new file of SPEAR data (named "spear-modified-partials.txt" above). This file can then be 'imported' into SPEAR for resynthesis.
  
  
• SPEAR-parse-partials-lisp.zip -- this archive unpacks into three files: "hey-brad-data.lisp", "parse-partials.lisp" and "abcl.jar". "hey-brad-data.lisp" is shows the lisp-preparation I did to the SPEAR-generated partials data file. "parse-partials.lisp" contains the lisp functions for reading this file and then writing the partials data for subsequent SPEAR importing and resynthesis. "abcl.jar" is v 0.23 of the Armed Bear Common Lisp (abcl) interprter (note: that site has v 0.27; for access to older releases go here. 0.27 will work fine with these simple files). To run the program, type this in a terminal window:
  
  java -jar abcl
  
  After the lisp interpreter starts up, type the following two commands:
  
  (load "hey-brad-data.lisp")
  (load "parse-partials.lisp")
  
  Then issue the following command:
  
  (parse-partials ppp 40)
  
  and the resulting SPEAR data will print to the screen. Select it and put it into a text file with this at the top:

  par-text-partials-format
  point-type time frequency amplitude
  partials-count 40
  partials-data
  	

  load into SPEAR and off ya go!

Assignments

+ do a bit of research on current theories of timbre perception, find one that you like (or possibly dislike). Be prepared to present and talk about it.

Here are a few names to get started:

David Huron
W. Dixon Ward
Stephen McAdams
Diana Deutsch
J. F. Schouten
Albert Bregman
Wayne Slawson
Fred Lerdahl
Lasse Thoresen
Denis Smalley
Pierre Schaeffer
Trevor Wishart

note: David Wessel and John Grey are purposefully off this list. We will be discussing their work in a future class.