Analysis and Perception of Sound (U01399)

? Credit Points : 10 ? SCQF Level : 10 ? Acronym : PHY-4-AnPerSou

An introduction to the analysis and perception of sound. Spectral analysis of sound is described and applied to musical instrument sounds. A review of the human perception of sound includes an introduction to current theories of the behaviour of the human ear. The course concludes with a short practical project.

Entry Requirements

? Pre-requisites : AM2 (MAT-1-am2); MM2 (MAT-1-mm2); Music Technology 2b (ACE-2-MTech2b). This course is not available to Senior Honours or Undergraduate Masters students in the School of Physics.

Variants

? This course has variants for part year visiting students, as follows

Analysis and Perception of Sound (VS1) (Not being delivered)

Subject Areas

Home subject area

Undergraduate (School of Physics), (School of Physics, Schedule Q)

Delivery Information

? Normal year taken : 4th year

? Delivery Period : Not being delivered

? Contact Teaching Time : 2 hour(s) per week for 11 weeks

All of the following classes

Type	Day	Start	End	Area
Lecture	Tuesday	10:00	10:50	KB
Lecture	Friday	10:00	10:50	KB

Summary of Intended Learning Outcomes

Upon successful completion of this course it is intended that a student will be able to:
1)understand and explain the relationship between time-domain and frequency-domain representations of a sound signal
2)identify the transient and steady state features of a sound signal, and discuss their relative perceptual significance
3)describe, without detailed mathematics, the principles of Fourier analysis, and give in tabular and graphical forms the amplitudes of the first six harmonics of a number of standard periodic waveforms
4)describe the principles of analog to digital conversion, explaining the significance of the sampling theorem, and choose an appropriate sampling rate for a signal of defined bandwidth
5)understand and explain the relationship between sampling time and frequency resolution, and discuss the use of windowing functions in spectral analysis
6)describe with the aid of diagrams the structure and functioning of the human hearing system
7)outline and compare current theories of human pitch perception
8)measure the pitches of various musical sounds using pitch-tracking software, and compare the results with the pitch estimates of a musically trained listener
9)explain the multidimensional nature of timbre, and describe different methods which have been devised to represent the timbre of musical sounds
10)carry out timbral analysis of various musical sounds using time-frequency analysis software, making appropriate choices of sampling and display parameters