DAFx17 Keynote 3: Miller Puckette - Time domain Manipulation via STFTs

Presented at the 20th International Conference on Digital Audio Effects (DAFx17)
Tuesday 5th September 2017, Edinburgh
http://dafx17.eca.ed.ac.uk/

Tutorial Abstract:
Perhaps the most important shortcoming of frequency-domain signal processing results from the Heisenberg limit that often forces tradeoffs between time and frequency resolution. In this paper we propose manipulating sounds by altering their STFTs in ways that affect time spans smaller than the analysis window length. An example of a situation in which this could be useful is the algorithm of Griffin and Lim, which generates a time-domain signal that optimally matches a (possibly overspecified) short-time amplitude spectrum. We propose an adaptation of Griffin-Lim to simultaneously optimize a signal to match such amplitude spectra on two or more different time scales, in order to simultaneously manage both transients and tuning.

Speaker Bio:
Miller Puckette obtained a B.S. in Mathematics from MIT (1980) and a PhD in Mathematics from Harvard (1986) where he was a Putnam Fellow. He was a member of MIT's Media Lab from its inception until 1987, and then a researcher at IRCAM, founded by composer and conductor Pierre Boulez. At IRCAM he wrote Max, a widely used computer music software environment, released commercially by Opcode Systems in 1990 and now available from Cycling74.com. Puckette joined the music department of the University of California, San Diego in 1994, where he is now professor. From 2000 to 2011 he was Associate Director of UCSD's Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA). He is currently developing Pure Data ("Pd"), an open-source real-time multimedia arts programming environment. Puckette has collaborated with many artists and musicians, including Philipe Manoury (whose Sonus ex Machina cycle was the first major work to use Max), and Rand Steiger, Vibeke Sorensen, and Juliana Snapper. Since 2004 he has performed with the Convolution Brothers. In 2008 Puckette received the SEAMUS Lifetime Achievement Award.