Research Projects

Feature Modulation Synthesis (FMS)

The origin of the idea for FMS came about during 2003-2004 studies in Music Information Retrieval and feature extraction for automatic timbre recognition studies as outlined as a “future work” project evolving to the present project. The motivation for this research can be traced to the somewhat lack of synthesis/re-synthesis tools for composers who wish to directly deal with perceptually relevant dimensions of sound and be able to control and manipulate such dimensions in the form of alteration of salient features. Classic synthesis algorithms commonly generate sound from scratch or by using sine tones sculpting noisy signals via control parameters that are often abstract and seemingly have little relationship to perceptually relevant nomenclatures. FMS tries to alleviate some of this disconnect between abstract control parameters and perceptually relevant ones by facilitating timbral control via modulation of salient features.

A FMS software toolbox is being developed which has included 15 salient feature modules so far. For the details about FMS please refer to our published papers.

Electro-Acoustic Music Analysis (EASY)

We started this project due to the lack of tools for electro-acoustic music analysis.The idea is to build a group of feature analysis modules addressing on a collection of salient sonic features of sound objects for analyzing the electroacoustic compositions. These feature analysis modules include silence detection, noiseness-modality-inharmonicity analysis, pitch detection, structure analysis, segmentation, multichannel spatialization, 3 dimentional spectral spread analysis, and spectral centroid analysis, etc.

Sitar Modeling

Initial studies in using physical modeling techniques to capture the buzzing nature of the sitar stringed instrument. For details please refer to our published papers.

Automatic Musical Instrument Recognition

Electro-Acoustic Music Composition