The assignment for the semester is a final project. At some point during the semester I will want to talk with each of you, both to work out what a good final project will be, and to make sure you have the necessary tools. Final projects may be presented while they're in progress or after they're finished (but I think in-progress is better). We'll carve out class time for this but if you'd rather meet privately to talk over your project we can set up a time before class.

Preliminary list of topics: (These topics might change or be rearranged depending on student interest; these initial ideas are based on the 8 student responses I've received so far to my initial e-mail. Each topic might take 3 or 4 weeks to cover adequately, depending on level of detail we end up getting into.)

Analysis and synthesis of the human voice. This touches on almost every other topic listed below, so it's natural to get started on this first. We'll probably return to it periodically over the semester as it touches on the other topics below.

Real-time interactivity and sensors. Combining inputs from microphones, other sensors, and mouse+keyboard to design playable musical insruments, either on the desktop or wearable.

Machine learning for music generation. This topic is outside my own expertise but it was the dominant one in the DAFx conference this September so I now at least know what some of the world is up to. I'm putting this a bit further down on the list so I can get some time to bone up myself first.

Electronic music production techniques. Designing plug-ins for DAWs, plus detecting beats and segmentation in pre-recorded music.

Tentative schedule:
Sep 7 intrductory meeting
Sep 14 Voice and electronics: phase vocoders, waveforms, partials
Sep 21 Vocoding; real-time vocal analysis
Sep 28 principal components for dimensional reduction
Oct 5 X/Y plots of signal pairs (PATCH) ; supervised neural networks (Lee/Wessel)
Oct 12 nonlinear feedback systems (PATCH)
Oct 19 spectral synthesis techniques: Pafs and possibly PSOLA (PATCHES FROM CLASS)... (the whackamode patch)
Oct 26 guitar patch; Markov chains; the null piece (smerdyakov)
Nov 2 chaotically coupled oscillators
Nov 9 room impulse responses and convolution reverb
Nov 16 Networking: OSC, FUDI, audio streaming, arduino-level IOTs
Nov 23 (no class)
Nov 30 equalizers, companders, and all that
Dec 7 Audio on IOTs: running Pd on an Espressif ESP32 board