Topics
The main source of topics is the book by D. Benson. It should not necessarily be the only source, though. Other books exist, and there is the Internet too.
- Waves and harmonics: the substance of sound (1-2h)
- Sound and its perception by human.
- Sine waves as the basic blocks of sound
- Harmonic motion, superposition, resonance.
- Fourier theory (2-4h)
- Fourier transform
- Convolution, spectrum
- Gabor transform, Wavelet transform
- A mathematician's guide to the orchestra (2-4h)
- Different ways sound can be generated by musical instruments.
- Description of standing waves in different instruments.
- Acoustics & the 3d wave equation.
- Consonance & dissonance (2h)
- Harmonics & Ratios.
- Complex spectra.
- Scales & temperaments (2h)
- History.
- Pythagorean scale. Western tempered scale.
- Major/minor.
- Equal/inequal temperament.
- Other scales.
- Digital sound (2-4h)
- Quantization. Dithering.
- Sampling. Nyquist theorem.
- FFT. Digital Linear Filters.
- MIDI, WAV & MP3.
- Musical sound synthesis (2h)
- Additive synthesis.
- Karplus-Strong algorithm.
- AM/FM
- CSound Demo
- Symmetry groups in music (2h)
- Algorithmic music composition (2h)
- Classification & categorization of music & sound (1-2h)
- Acoustics (2h)
- Reverberation, reflection, refraction, diffusion, absorbtion.
- Room/studio acoustics.
- Modeling acoustics.
- Pitch detection (1-2h)
- Link?
- Speech recognition and synthesis (2-4h)
- Music theory (2h)
- General principles of harmony
- Melody, bass lines.
- Movement, interest, variety, accent, motive.
- Texture & timbre.
- Counterpoint.
- Composition.
- Musical genres (<1h)
- Review of sound/music processing tools (1h)
- Review of sound compression methods (1-2h)
- MP3, WMA, OGG, APE...
- Musical notations (<1h)
- Sound/music hardware basics (1h)
- Dealing with noise (1-2h)
- Coctail party problem, ICA, Blind deconvolution (2h)