James W. Beauchamp

Professor Emeritus, School of Music (Composition-Theory)
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Urbana, Illinois 61801 USA

James W. Beauchamp has been pursuing various projects in musical sound analysis/synthesis. Some of them are below.
(If links don't work, try deleting the ~ in front of beaucham (if it exists) in the URL.)

1) Exploration of a method of multiple wavetable synthesis called "Spectral Dynamic Synthesis". The idea is to be able to emulate acoustic musical instruments and to control their loudness, pitch, brightness, attack, decay, and other parameters while retaining their naturalness. Beauchamp has worked on this project in conjunction with Andrew Horner at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST).

 
  Here is a Spectral Dynamic Synthesis trumpet demonstration (wav file) (mp3 file).

2) Determination of methods for testing listeners's abilities to discriminate between original acoustic sounds and synthetic replicas. In particular, Beauchamp and Stephen McAdams, Director, Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music, Media & Technology (CIRMMT) Faculty of Music, McGill University, have examined the perceptual effects of various simplifications of the time/frequency spectral representations of musical instrument sounds. From this research they found that spectral centroid variation and spectral envelope irregularity are very important parameters for timbral quality of musical sounds. Some results of this research were published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (Vol. 105, No. 2, Feb., 1999).

3) Continued development of C/Unix-based software packages, SNDAN, for sound spectrum analysis, and Music 4C, for musical score synthesis.

 
   Click here to download a PowerPoint talk on SNDAN.
   (Please let me know if the sounds don't play)

4) In conjunction with former Music and ECE graduate student Tim Madden, development of Armadillo , an award-winning real-time/non-real-time musical sound spectrum analyzer, for PPC Macintosh computers. (Armadillo won the Bourges Computer Music Software Competition in the sound analysis catagory in 1998.)

5) With former ECE graduate students Zheng (Geoffrey) Hua (from Beijing) and Bowon Lee (from Korea), research on spectrum-based piano tone analysis and synthesis.

 
Here is a spectrum-based wavetable-synthesized piano demonstration (wav file) (mp3 file).

6) With current UIUC ECE graduate student Mert Bay to develop software for polyphonic pitch detection and instrument voice separation. Files giving our first separation results are here . We are also working on pitch and separation processing of a woodwind quintet. As a first step in that direction, we have recorded the individual voices of a WWQ on separate channels .

7) With Andrew Horner and Richard Lo at HKUST to find an improved metric for predicting perceptual differences between original and altered musical sounds and to find important timbral correlates beyond rise time, duration, and spectral centroid. Perceptual difference estimation metrics are discussed in

A. B. Horner, J. W. Beauchamp, and R. H. Y. So (2006). "A search for best metrics to predict discrimination of original and spectrally altered musical instrument sounds", J. Audio Eng. Soc., Vol. 54, No. 3, pp. 140-156.

Timbral correlates are discussed in

J. Beauchamp, A. B. Horner, H.-F. Koehn, and M. Bay (2006). "Multidimensional scaling analysis of centroid- and attack/decay-normalized musical instrument sounds" (abstract), J. Acoust. Soc. Am., Vol. 120, No. 5, Pt. 2, p. 3276.

8) Teaching: A seminar on Analysis/Synthesis and Music Signal Processing is offered periodically. This is an informal seminar where students as well as the professor present their own work and discuss professional papers of interest.

9) Organizing special sessions at meetings of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA): E.g., "Analysis, Synthesis, Perception, and Classification of Musical Sounds", at the December, 2002 meeting in Cancun, Mexico. Click to see the abstracts of this session. Click to see some pictures from the meeting . Recently Beauchamp organized and chaired a double ASA session titled "Musical Pitch Tracking and Sound Source Separation Leading to Automatic Music Transcription" at the 154th meeting of the ASA in New Orleans (November 27 - December 1, 2007). Click here to see abstracts from these sessions.

Click here for List of Publications

Click here to go to the Computer Music Project home page.

Click here to send email to James Beauchamp.

Latest update: 02/22/09.