Audio Effects

Joshua D. Reiss, Ph.D, is a senior lecturer with the Centre for Digital Music in the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science at Queen Mary University of London. He has bachelor’s degrees in both physics and mathematics, and earned his Ph.D in physics from the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is a member of the Board of Governors of the Audio Engineering Society, and co-founder of the company MixGenius. Dr. Reiss has published more than 100 scientific papers and serves on several steering and technical committees. He has investigated music retrieval systems, time scaling and pitch shifting techniques, polyphonic music transcription, loudspeaker design, automatic mixing for live sound, and digital audio effects. His primary focus of research, which ties together many of the above topics, is on the use of state-of-the-art signal processing techniques for professional sound engineering. Andrew P. McPherson, Ph.D, joined Queen Mary University of London as a lecturer in the Centre for Digital Music in September 2011. He holds a Ph.D in music composition from the University of Pennsylvania and an M.Eng in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Prior to joining Queen Mary, he was a postdoc in the Music Entertainment Technology Laboratory at Drexel University, supported by a Computing Innovation Fellowship from the Computing Research Association and the National Science Foundation (NSF). Dr. McPherson’s current research topics include electronic augmentation of the acoustic piano, new musical applications of multi-touch sensing, quantitative studies of expressive performance technique, and embedded audio processing systems. He remains active as a composer of orchestral, chamber, and electronic music, with performances across the United States, Canada, and the UK at venues including the Tanglewood and Aspen music festivals.

Introduction and Fundamentals. Delay Line Effects. Filter Design. Filter Effects. Amplitude Modulation. Dynamics Processing. Overdrive, Distortion, and Fuzz. The Phase Vocoder. Spatial Audio. The Doppler Effect. Reverberation. Audio Production. Building Audio Effect Plug-Ins.