This page hosts some additional course materials for the
Auditory Computing
module at UCL Computer Science, for delivery in
Term 2 (January-March 2026). For the main body of course materials, please see the Moodle page.
Tutorial 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 (15 Jan 2026)
- Lab 2: Digital Audio Processing & Synthesis (22 Jan 2026)
- Lab 3: Sonification (29 Jan 2026)
- Lab 4: Signal Detection & Psychophysics (5 Feb 2026)
- 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 5: Auditory Scene Analysis (12 Feb 2026)
- Lab 6: Speech (26 Feb 2026)
- 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.
- OpenAI’s Whisper is free, open source and runs locally.
It may not be the last word in speech recognition, but it sets the baseline pretty high.
(I’m using the mlx-whisper package, which is optimised for
Apple Silicon.)
- Blind Source Separation example from
scikit-learn using Independent Component Analysis
- Lab 7: Space & Localisation (5 Mar 2026)
- Lab 8: Pitch & Texture (12 Mar 2026)
- Lab 9: Generating Music with Deep Learning (19 Mar 2026)
Coursework
There is one assessed coursework component, worth 30% of the overall module marks.
Details of this assignment can be found at the link below.
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.
Audio Analysis & Editing
Audio Synthesis & Processing
Auditory Modeling
Sonification
Music Analysis
Music Notation
Live Coding
Algorithmic Composition