Biography

Duncan is an Apple Certified Logic Pro trainer and lecturer in Audio Engineering at the City of Westminster College, London, and began work (part-time) on his PhD at the IoSR in October 2004.

Duncan was on the committee organising the Digital Music Research Network summer 2005 conference in Glasgow, and presented at the AES 2006 Paris Conference, and AES 2007 Vienna Convention. In 2008 he sat on the panel at the APRS London workshop in July, and performed badly in polite company at the London International Music Show, for Vigier guitars.

Publications

D.Williams & T.Brookes "Perceptually-Motivated Audio Morphing: Brightness", 122nd Audio Engineering Society Convention, May 2007, Vienna, Convention Paper 7035

D.Williams & T.Brookes "Perceptually-motivated audio morphing: softness", AES 126th Convention in Munich, May 7-10, 2009

Research Project

Perceptual Considerations in Audio Morphing

Duncan Williams
Tim Brookes

Audio morphing is a technique for creating a new sound with some of the characteristics of each of a pair of existing sounds. Many systems focus on interpolating spectral, or spectral and temporal features from each source sound, to create a new feature set for additive resynthesis.

The aim of this project is to create an intuitive interface for perceptual control of an audio morpher, adjusting specific timbral attributes by means of underlying multidimensional acoustic manipulation, to create a toolset for creative sound design and composition.

Systems of cross synthesis and hybridisation have been investigated, including phase vocoding, automatic audio morphing, and spectral modelling synthesis. The open source nature of Spectral Modelling Synthesis lent itself to the development of a timbre morpher, an adapted system which can be refined to produce a perceptually configured, intuitive user interface for audio morphing.

Various timbral attributes (brightness, softness, warmth, richness, hollowness, etc) have been shown to correlate with acoustic parameters, which can be exploited by the timbre morphing code. A system which is robust to spectral, temporal, and spectrotemporal attributes is being refined and tested in order to produce a perceptually configured user interface for audio morphing. Outside morphing, other applications could also include timbral synthesis and metering.