Signals, Calls, and Marches

Catalog description

This class looks at "creative signal processing" in the same way we look at "creative coding" - celebrating our ability to manipulate signals - functions and blocks of information that travel across time, frequency, and space - in the wider context of human perception, communication, and culture. In this course, we will consider standard building blocks of signal processing - audio and image synthesis, time- and frequency-domain processing of audio signals, chromatic and spatial processing of images, and feature extraction for signal analysis - in the same context as human languages, writing systems, and cultures of generative and procedural design in music, performance, and visual art. The project scope for the course is designed to be flexible and open-ended, allowing for students to develop projects ranging from guitar effects pedals to audio-visual plug-ins to preprocessing workflows for machine learning to toolkits relevant to integrating real-time data into interactive performance systems. Students will be assigned a series of short exercises around each general theme, and will be expected to develop a semester-length project. The class will use the Gen architecture of Max/MSP/Jitter to prototype algorithms for C++ and GLSL, with explorations into other coding environments, hardware circuits, and physical explorations of signal processing along the way.