Auditory Computing

Course materials for the Auditory Computing module at UCL Computer Science, for delivery in Term 2 (January-March 2025).

Tutorial Lab Sessions

Please bring your laptop and suitable headphones/earphones!

A provisional schedule is shown below — note that the topics are only indicative and will almost certainly change as we go along. Links to any associated content or requirements for each week will be added as necessary. Tutorial code will generally be found in the tutorials repo.

Lab 1: Basic Acoustics & Auditory Perception (16 Jan 2025)
- lab01.py is a script for some basic sound generation and playback using the simpleaudio python package. Provided in case anyone is interested, but note that you do not need to run this yourself.
- The tutorial makes use of some free audio metering plug-ins. Again, you do not need these for anything on the module, but they can be useful for visualising audio data. Links included for completeness, feel free to ignore.
  - Wave Observer (oscilloscope)
  - Voxengo SPAN (spectrum analyser)
  - TB Spectrogram (spectrogram & spectrum analyser)
Lab 2: Signal Detection & Psychophysics (23 Jan 2025)
- During the lab you will act as experimental subjects in some basic psychophysics experiments that run in your browser. (You will definitely need headphones for these.)
Lab 3: Digital Signal Processing (30 Jan 2025)
- DSP tutorial notebook (opens in Google Colab)
Lab 4: Auditory Scene Analysis (6 Feb 2025)
- lab04.tidal is a Tidal Cycles script used to produce some sound examples in the tutorial
- CASA tutorial notebook (opens in Google Colab)
Lab 5: Speech (13 Feb 2025)
- If you would like to try viewing your formants and segmenting a speech spectrogram, your best bet is probably Audacity a free, cross-platform and full-featured audio recording and editing application with built-in spectrogram capabilities.
- You could also use a plug-in such as TB Spectrogram with your preferred audio app.
- Or do it in code with an audio library such as librosa or pyfar.
- Blind Source Separation example from scikit-learn using Independent Component Analysis
Lab 6: Space & Localisation (27 Feb 2025)
- Auditory Localisation tutorial notebook (opens in Google Colab)
Lab 7: ~~Pitch & Texture (6 Mar 2025)~~
- cancelled due to illness
Lab 8: Sonification (13 Mar 2025)
- lab07.sc is a SuperCollider script for pitch & tuning examples deferred from last week
- Sonification tutorial notebook (opens in Google Colab)
Lab 9: Generating Music with Deep Learning (20 Mar 2025)

Links & Resources

Some of these may be discussed or used in lectures or practicals, others are purely for interest. At some point they might get organised along such lines, but in the meantime feel free to browse around.