I was tasked by my Creative Director: Alejandro Hernandez to develop the session cards illustrating concepts taught in their respective session for Perry Cook's Physics-Based Sound Synthesis for Games and Interactive Systems course in collaboration with Kadenze. In this course, he introduces the basics of Digital Signal Processing and computational acoustics, motivated by the vibrational physics of real-world objects and systems. Each session had specific topics that were being covered, so Perry and I picked key phrases and used those as the themes for each card.

Session 1: The Time Domain: Sound, Digital Audio, PCM Files, Noise Vs. Pitch, A Hint Of Spectra a) Sound in Air, Traveling Waves b) Digital Audio, Sampling, Quantization, Aliasing c) Soundfiles, Wavetables, Manipulating PCM d) Pitch (vs. Noise), Spectral Analysis 0.1 e) Time-domain Pitch/Noise Detection: ZeroXings, AMDF, Autocorrelation

Session 2: Physics, Oscillators, Sines & Spectra, Spectral/Additive Synthesis a) Mass-Spring-Damper system, also simple Pendulum b) Fourier analysis/synthesis, Spectrum Analysis 1.0 c) More on additive Sine-wave synthesis

Session 3: Digital Filters, Modal Synthesis a) Digital Filters, Finite Impulse Response (FIR) b) Linearity, Time-invariance, Convolution c) Infinite Impulse Response (IIR) Digital Filters d) BiQuad Resonator Filter, Modal Synthesis

Session 4: Physical Modeling Synthesis: 1D Systems a) 1-D systems, Strings, Modal (Fourier) Solution b) Strings II: Waveguide (D’Alembert) Solution c) 1-D systems, Bars, Tubes, solutions d) Advanced Waveguide Synthesis for 1-D systems

Session 5: Physical Modeling II: 2 And 3-D Systems a) 2-D systems, plates, drums, higher-order modes Fourier (Sine and/or Modal) Solutions, Waveguide Solutions b) 3-D systems, rooms, resonators, Meshes, Waveguides c) Resonator/Modal view and solution of 3-D systems Pop bottles and other lumped resonators

Session 6: Subtractive Synthesis, Vocal Sounds And Models a) Subtractive Synthesis, Voice Synthesis, Formants b) Linear Prediction, LPC c) FOFs d) FM Synthesis: Horns, Bells, Voices

Session 7: Grains, Particles And Statistical Models a) Wavelets b) Granular Synthesis c) Particle Models, Statistical Modal Synthesis d) Wind, Water, Surf, and Other Whooshing Sounds

Session 8: Extending And Refining Physical Synthesis Models a) Waveshaping Synthesis, Distortion Modeling b) Time-Varying Systems c) Stiffness, All-Pass Filters, Banded Waveguides d) Commuted Synthesis e) JULIUS on KS, strings, demos

Session 9: Tying It All Together: Applications, Sonification, Interactions, And Control a) Scanned Synthesis b) Don’t forget the laptop!!! SMELT: c) Controlling Synthesis with game controllers (Wii, mobile TouchOSC, more) d) Walking Synthesis, a complete system e) Procedural Audio: Driving synthesis from process, game state, etc. f) Data set Sonification