Thomas Hélie: New tools for modelling musical systems and exploring musical sound

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When: Wednesday 20th January, 2016 @ 5:10 PM

Where: TBC, Informatics Forum, University of Edinburgh

Seminar Title

New tools for modelling musical systems and exploring musical sound. 

Seminar Speaker(s)

Dr. Thomas Hélie (Project-Team S3: Sound Signals and Systems, Laboratory of Sciences and Technologies for Music and Sound, IRCAM-CNRS-UPMC, Paris, France).

Seminar Abstract

In this presentation, I will present a few scientific and technological tools that we develop to model physical systems and to process sound signals. The introduction will be devoted to a short description of some activities of the Project-Team S3 in physical modelling, nonlinear systems, robotics, sound synthesis and sound analysis. Then, selected works will be deepened.

  1. Port-Hamiltonian systems: sound synthesis based on the guaranteed-passive simulation of physical models.
  2. Fractional filters: modelling and simulation of a class of low-pass filters, the slope of which can be continuously tuned from 0 (unit gain) to -6 decibel per octave (1 pole filter).
  3. SnailAnalyser: a frequency-domain analyser that delivers in real-time an intuitive representation of sounds based on the chromatic alignment of spectral active zones.

Sound examples and demonstrations will be given along this presentation.

Speaker Bio

Thomas Hélie received the Dipl. Ing. degree from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications de Bretagne (1997), the M.S. degree in acoustics, signal processing, and informatics applied to music, Université Pierre et Marie Curie (1999), the M.S. degree in control theory and signal processing from the Université Paris-Sud (1999), and the Ph.D. degree in control theory and signal processing of Université Paris-Sud (2002). After a postdoctoral research in the Laboratory of Nonlinear System at the Swiss Federal Institute of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland (2003) and a Lecturer position at Université Paris-Sud (2004), he has been, since 2004, Researcher at the National Research Council (CNRS) in the Analysis/Synthesis Team of the Laboratory of Sciences and Technologies for Music and Sound, IRCAM-CNRS-UPMC, Paris. He passed his “Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches”, Université Pierre et Marie Curie (2013) and founded the Project-Team S3 “Sound Signals and Systems” (2015). His research topics include audio processing, physics of musical instruments, physical modeling, nonlinear dynamical systems, and inversion processes.