The NESS Multichannel Research Space
The algorithm team, made up of of the project PI, five PhD students and a postdoctoral RA in the Acoustics and Audio Group at the University of Edinburgh, is responsible for numerical algorithm design for a variety of sound producing acoustic systems. They work from first principles to design simulation methods—always in the Matlab prototyping language. The major concerns here are numerical stability, especially under strongly nonlinear conditions, modularity of design (so that various components may be combined in a natural, and, above all, algorithmically simple manner), and in making sure that numerical artifacts do not degrade sound quality—especially important, as we aim to work always at a reasonable audio sample rate! Members of the algorithm team have collaborated with like-minded researchers at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Techniques Avancées, in Palaiseau, France, the Aalto University of Technology, in Espoo, Finland, the Centre Nationale de Recherche Scientifique in Marseille, France, and the Universite de Paris VI in Paris, France.
The HPC team, based at the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre, attacks the delicate problem of porting Matlab code to C, and then accelerating it by using various techniques, including multicore and CUDA.
The creative team is a set of visiting composers, who will experiment with the finished implementations produced by the HPC team, generate musical compositions, and provide feedback to the Algorithm team. Composers will undergo workshops with the PI at Edinburgh; some have already been chosen, but if you are a composer and have an interest in this kind of synthesis, and are a) interested in multichannel electronic composition, b) don’t mind working out of real time, c) are fairly adept with computers and d) don’t mind truly rotten weather, then by all means contact us—we’d love to hear from you! NB: As I write this in December 2016, I can happily say that b) can be amended to “a little bit out of real time.”
