Analysis, synthesis and gestural control of expressive sonic textures in musical contexts
(2011)
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- (en) Recent advancements in digital technologies have dramatically extended the means of musical expression. Among the wide range of sounds that can be rendered through digital processes, the sonic textures refer to a specific class of sounds, characterized by a constant long-term structure emerging from the accumulation of micro sonic events subject to some temporal and spectral variability. This distinctive composite structure makes sonic textures very singular in a perceptual point of view with regards to other categories of sounds such as instrumental sounds or noises. While textures constitute in one side an essential part of our everyday auditory environment, these are also widely found in musical contexts, especially in electro-acoustic and contemporary music compositions. This thesis approaches the question of the expressive sonic textures, occurring in this latter kind of creative contexts, according to three main research axes, namely the analysis, the synthesis and the gestural control in the setting of interactive audio systems. The first part of this thesis deals with the human perception of sonic textures. It aims at identifying the main perceptual criteria on which the human listener relies to discriminate different textures occurring in musical contexts, and then possibly determining signal features which could allow to quantitatively assess these perceptually meaningful attributes. Relying on the results of a listening experiment conducted on a panel of human subjects, we propose a new audio descriptor, referred to as 'granularity coefficient', which can be used as a measure of the micro-fluctuations of the temporal envelope of the textures. The second part of the thesis is about the digital synthesis of sonic textures. It includes a comprehensive review of the synthesis techniques enabling to generate a wide range of such kind of sounds through digital processes. A number of these methods have then been implemented in the Max-MSP programming environment and embedded in a series of interactive audio systems, relying on various types of interactive devices to control the synthesis parameters in an intuitive way. The last part of this thesis comes within the scope of an increasing research trend in the Sound and Music Computing field, which consists in the design of innovative and meaningful musical interfaces enhancing the expressive possibilities offered to the computer music performer. We also investigate, through a number of practical experimentations, various strategies of gestural control of sonic textures, based on different kinds of synthesis algorithms and gestural devices.
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Filatriau, J.-J. (2011). Analysis, synthesis and gestural control of expressive sonic textures in musical contexts. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/154150