This entry is about a suite of audio research, analysis, and transform software that is brought to you by the good people of Barcelona Spain and Santa Barbara, California. But no need to worry for us ugly americans their website, and software are in English. The software contains several tools that will allow the audio phreak or just plain tinkerer to have a virtual playground on that person’s computer. Notice how I did not say he? I have used this software on my system to record various outside bird calls and whistles around my house, and then filter out the background noise, at least I hope it was the background noise. I then took these calls and attached them to pictures on a website for further comment by real bird watchers, who actually knew what they were about.

Did I mention that you don’t need to know anything about FFT, transform this or transform that? All the work is done in a graphical environment which you can use to do what you want.

The other application that I have used this software for include analysing the thrum of an electric motor to indicate whether this motor was having systematic problems, like bearing issues. This software is definitely overkill for this application, but what the heck, I knew what I was looking for, and I did not need to buy any expensive software to provide filtering. I just recorded the sound of the motor with a microphone using audacity, and then used this software to filter out everything except the periodic signal that was associated with the bearing. And yes the bearing was having a problem, and I managed to convince the owner of the company that my violinist’s training in high school was actually still operating correctly.

The FAQ lists the capabilities of this software as :

  • Read and write multichannel audio files in virtually any format (wav, aiff, mp3, ogg…)
  • Implement filters in the frequency domain
  • Implement applications based on the FFT
  • Compute statistical descriptors on the sound and its spectral features
  • Passivate/activate objects into XML
  • Use graphical plots to debug signal data objects
  • Implement applications based on the LPC model
  • Play audio in any platform Use frame-based signal constructs and dump them into XML or SDIF
  • Connect simple Processing objects dynamically to form Networks
  • Use the event-based Control mechanism to control run-time behaviour of Processing objects
  • Create statical compositions of Processing objects
  • Convert MIDI files into XML
  • Implement a basic MIDI-controlled synthesizer
  • Input and output MIDI messages into a system
  • Implement spectral analysis based applications
  • Implement a complex synthesizer based on the SMS model
  • Implement analysis/synthesis applications including transformations and graphical user interface
  • Create real-time spectral-domain analysis/synthesis applications, controlled from a GUI
  • Define Processing Networks graphically and dynamically so as to build rapid prototypes

The current release even implements a plug-in interface so if I want to, and know what I am doing with signal processing I can write my own filters. The website provides binary builds for us Windows people who have no programming expertise, but also provides MacOSX , and some Linux builds for the others in this world who are not hobbled by a corporate entity, i.e. have a job where Windows is used. Have a look see if you like playing with audio.