measurement & analysis

recursive soundcard testing (2016)

The biggest challenge in testing seems to be the testing of the testing equipment. The self-referential nature of this problem may pose a technical challenge. Even the accurate testing results may not be sufficiently informative in choosing a soundcard. The audible difference is often minute among quality conversions. In order to be able to audibly assess the difference I designed a testing procedure that repeatedly plays and records the sound through a cable connecting the outputs and the inputs. This setup has allowed me to clearly hear that a PrismSound soundcard does beat RME, after about hundred iterations. Also, many cards are not calibrated and the re-recording has to be made with adaptive volum levels. Here is the link to SuperCollider code that performs this recursive test.

zero-padding challenge (2009)

Having doubts about the theoretical stance that zero-padding will not improve the capacity of FFT to resolve partials I coded an example in SuperCollider showing two sufficiently close sinusoids to be separable only using zero-padding. Julius Smith claims that this does not contradict the theory, however it remains to be demonstrated how this example could work without zero-padding.

loudspeaker position triangulation (2008)

Commissioned by the Birmingham Electro-acoustic Sound Theatre, a customisable software was built to automatically calculate the exact positions of multiple loudspeakers in a room. Using three microphones, different delay times were established from emitted impulses and used to locate each speaker in space. It allowed for calibration against different microphone placements and specific environmental factors.

hungarian vowel recognition (2006)

Commissioned by SZTAKI, the centre for automation and IT, a SuperCollider application was built that would recognise the vowels of the Hungarian language. The estimations were networked through the UDP OSC protocol and the software was used to drive video processing algorithms.

sonic quiz (2004)

Inspired by the complexity of psychoacoustics an experimental setting was explored to reflect on the primacy of different acoustic parameters.