Cool sound design and audio effects projects

Every year, I teach two classes (modules), Sound Design and Digital Audio Effects. In both classes, the final assignment involves creating an original work that involves audio programming and using concepts taught in class. But the students also have a lot of free reign to experiment and explore their own ideas. Last year, I had a well received blog entry about the projects.


From the Sound Design class;

  • A truly novel abstract sound synthesis (amplitude and frequency modulation) where parameters are controlled by pitch recognition and face recognition machine learning models, using the microphone and the webcam. Users could use their voice and move their face around to affect the sound.
  • An impressive one had six sound models: rain, bouncing ball, sea waves, fire, wind and explosions. It also had a website where each synthesised sound could be compared against real recordings. We couldn’t always tell which was real and which was synthesised!


  • An auditory model of a London Underground train, from the perspective of a passenger on a train, or waiting at a platform. It had a great animation.


  • Two projects involved creating interactive soundscapes auralising an image. One involved a famous photo taken by the photographer, Gregory Crewdson. encapsulating  a dark side of suburban America through surreal, cinematic imagery. The other was an estate area, where there are no bodies visible , giving the impression of an eerie atmosphere where background noises and small sounds are given prominence.

And from the Digital Audio Effects class;

  • A create-your-own distortion effect, where the user can interactively modify the wave shaping curve.
  • Input dependant modulation signal based on the physical mass/ spring system
  • A Swedish death metal guitar effect combining lots of effects for a very distinctive sound
  • A very creative all-in-one audio toy, ‘Ring delay’. This  augmented ping-pong delay effect gives controls over the panning of the delays, the equalization of the audio input and delays, and the output gain. Delays can be played backwards, and the output can be set out-of-phase. Finally, a ring modulator can modulate the audio input to create new sounds to be delayed.
  • Chordify, which transforms an incoming signal, ideally individual notes, into a chord of three different pitches.


  • An audio effects chain inspired by interning at a local radio station. The student helped the owner produce tracks using effects chain presets. But this producers understanding of compressors, EQ, distortion effects… was fairly limited. So the student recreated one of the effects chains into a plugin that only has two adjustable parameters which control multiple parameters inside. 
  • Old Styler, a plug-in that applies sort of a ‘vintage’ effect so that it sounds like from an old radio or an old, black and white movie. Here’s how it sounds.
  • There were some advanced reverbs, including a VST implementation of a state-of-the-art reverberation algorithm known as a Scattering Delay Network (SDN), and a Church reverb incorporating some additional effects to get that ‘church sound’ just right.
  • A pretty amazing cave simulator, with both reverb and random water droplet sounds as part of the VST plug-in.


  • A bit crusher, which also had noise, downsampling and filtering to allow lots of ways to degrade the signal.
  • A VST implementation of the Euclidian Algorithm for world rhythms as described by Goddfried Toussaint in his paper The Euclidean Algorithm Generates Traditional Musical Rhythms.
  • A mid/side processor, with excellent analysis to verify that the student got the implementation just right.
  • Multi-functional distortion pedal. Guitarists often compose music in their bedroom and would benefit from having an effect to facilitate filling the song with a range of sounds, traditionally belonging to other instruments. That’s what this plug-in did, using a lot of clever tricks to widen the soundstage of the guitar.
  • Related to the multi-functional distortion, two students created multiband distortion effects.
  • A Python project that separates a track into harmonic, percussive, and residual components which can be adjusted individually.
  • An effect that attempts to resynthesise any audio input with sine wave oscillators that take their frequencies from the well-tempered scale. This goes far beyond auto-tune, yet can be quite subtle.
  • A source separator plug-in based on Dan Barry’s ADRESS algorithm, described here and here. Along with Mikel Gainza, Dan Barry cofounded the company Sonic Ladder, which released the successful software Riffstation, based on their research.

There were many other interesting assignments, including several variations on tape emulation. But this selection really shows both the talent of the students and the possibilities to create new and interesting sounds.


What’s up with the Web Audio API?


















cross-adaptive architecture




Here’s a short video demonstrating this.


Check it out!

Analogue matched digital EQ: How far can you go linearly?
















Creative projects in sound design and audio effects



From the Sound Design class;




And from the Digital Audio Effects class;



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Ten Years of Automatic Mixing









Here’s a video of one of the early Automatic Mixing demonstrators.

And here’s a list of all the early Automatic Mixing papers.


What the f*** are DFA faders?

I’ve been meaning to write this blog entry for a while, and I’ve finally gotten around to it. At the 142nd AES Convention, there were two papers that really stood out which weren’t discussed in our convention preview or convention wrap-up. One was about Acoustic Energy Harvesting, which we discussed a few weeks ago, and the other was titled ‘The DFA Fader: Exploring the Power of Suggestion in Loudness The DFA Fader: Exploring the Power of Suggestion in Loudness Judgments.’ When I mentioned this paper to others, their response was always the same, “What’s a DFA Fader?” . Well, the answer is hinted at in the title of this blog entry.

The basic idea is that musicians often give instructions to the sound engineer that he or she can’t or doesn’t want to follow. For instance, a vocalist might say “Turn me up” in a soundcheck, but the sound engineer knows that the vocals are at a nice level already and any more amplification might cause feedback. Sometimes, this sort of thing can be communicated back to the musician in a nice way. But there’s also the fallback option; a fader on the mixing console that “Does F*** All”, aka DFA. The engineer can slide the fader or twiddle an unconnected dial, smile back and say ‘Ok, does this sound a bit better?’.

A couple of companies have had fun with this idea. Funk Logic’s Palindrometer, shown below, is nothing more than a filler for empty rack space. Its an interface that looks like it might do something, but at best, it just flashes some LEDs when one toggles switches and turns the knobs.


RANE have the PI 14 Pseudoacoustic Infector . Its worth checking out the full description, complete with product review and data sheets. I especially like the schematic, copied below.


And in 2014, our own Brecht De Man  released The Wire, a freely available VST and AudioUnit plug-in that emulates a gold-plated, balanced, 100% lossless audio connector.


Anyway, the authors of this paper had the bright idea of doing legitimate subjective evaluation of DFA faders. They didn’t make jokes in the paper, not even to explain the DFA acronym. They took 22 participants and divided them into an 11 person control group and an 11 person test group. In the control group, each subject participated in twenty trials where two identical musical excerpts were presented and the subject had to rate the difference in loudness of vocals between the two excerpts. Only ten excerpts were used, so each pair was used in two trials. In the test group, a sound engineer was present and he made scripted suggestions that he was adjusting the levels in each trial. He could be seen, but participants couldn’t see his hands moving on the console.

Not surprisingly, most trials showed a statistically significant difference between test and control groups, confirming the effectiveness of verbal suggestions associated with the DFA fader. And the authors picked up on an interesting point; results were far more significant for stimuli where vocals were masked by other instruments. This links the work to psychoacoustic studies. Not only is our perception of loudness and timbre influenced by the presence of a masker, but we have a more difficult time judging loudness and hence are more likely to accept the suggestion from an expert.

The authors did an excellent job of critiquing their results. But unfortunately, the full data was not made available with the paper. So we are left with a lot of questions. What were these scripted suggestions? It could make a big difference if the engineer said “I’m going to turn the vocals way up” versus “Let me try something. Does it sound any different now?” And were some participants immune to the suggestions? And because participants couldn’t see a fader being adjusted (interviews with sound engineers had stressed the importance of verbal suggestions), we don’t know how that could influence results.

There is something else that’s very interesting about this. It’s a ‘false experiment’. The whole listening test is a trick since for all participants and in all trials, there was never any loudness differences between the two presented stimuli. So indirectly, it looks at an ‘auditory placebo effect’ that is more fundamental than DFA faders. What were the ratings for loudness differences that participants gave? For the control group especially, did they judge these differences to be small because they trusted their ears, or large because they knew that loudness judging is the nature of the test? Perhaps there is a natural uncertainty in loudness perception regardless of bias. How much weaker does a listener’s judgment become when repeatedly asked to make very subtle choices in a listening test? There’s been some prior work tackling some of these questions, but I think this DFA Faders paper opened up a lot of avenues of interesting research.