Teaching

Resources relating to my teaching are collected here. See also the Resources page for some related tools and demos.

Musical Applications of Fourier Theory and DSP (course link)

Lecture 1: Signals, Sinusoids, and Complex Exponentials

Building a sound out of sinusoids	Shows that by adding together just the right amplitude and phase of a set of sinusoids, a complex audio signal can be synthesised. Any mono audio signal is exactly the sum of sinusoids at its DFT frequencies. Add them in from the lowest frequency upward, and listen to the sound assemble itself. GUI web app.
Quantisation and bit depth in digital audio	Explore the effect of level quantisation, controlled via bit-depth, on the sound of digital audio files.
Taylor series reconstruction	Interactive demo showing Taylor series reconstruction of a few common functions.
Cosine and sine functions as projections from a rotating phasor	Interactive animation illustrating the generation of cosine and sine functions from a rotating phasor.
Beating and psychoacoustic roughness	What happens if we add together a pair of periodic signals where the frequencies are similar, but not quite the same? If the signals are simple sinusoids, we get interesting “beating” effects. If the signals are each rich in harmonics, such as sawtooth waves, human listeners experience quite particular psychoacoustic effects – sometimes called “roughness”.
Damped sinusoids and complex frequency	Interactive demo showing the generation of a damped sinusoid via the idea of complex frequency.