January 9: Introduction. Definitions of sound, music, and noise.
January 11: How digital audio works. Basics of writing an audio program in Max/MSP.
January 16: Holiday. No class meeting.
January 18: Wavetables and control functions in Max/MSP.
January 23: Commercial audio/music software.
January 25: Musical scales, tuning, and interference; additive synthesis.
January 30: Wavetable synthesis, additive synthesis, sampling synthesis.
February 1: Amplitude modulation, frequency modulation.
February 6: The MIDI protocol, MIDI files, mapping MIDI to synthesis and effects.
February 8: Waveshaping (distortion) synthesis. Midterm review.
February 13: Midterm exam. Project planning for remainder of quarter.
February 15: Guest lecturers: E. Michael Richards, David Kim-Boyle, William Kleinsasser.
February 20: Holiday. No class meeting.
February 22: Panning, spatialization, and reverberation.
February 27: Filters and subtractive synthesis.
March 1: I/O streams, buffers, callback functions, audio file formats, PortAudio. C and Java programming of basic audio functionality.
March 6: Windowing and convolution. Fourier analysis and resynthesis techniques.
March 8: Granular synthesis; compression, ducking, gating, limiting.
March 13: Final review.
March 15: Final written exam. Review of final project presentations.
March 22: 1:30-3:30 pm, Final project presentations.