Les Mercredis de STMS welcome Stefan Bilbao, professor at the University of Edinburgh, invited by Thomas Elie of the S3AM team of the Science Technique Musique et Son laboratory (IRCAM, CNRS, Sorbonne University, French Ministry of Culture). He will present his latest research on listening simulations, virtual acoustics at audio bitrate and sound synthesis.
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Abstract
Numerical simulation is an indispensable tool in modern acoustics, and many distinct frameworks have emerged. A use case to be discussed here is the emulation of room acoustics, or so-called virtual acoustics, as well as the related case of realistic sound synthesis based on musical instrument models. In the context of audible sound, particularly when nonlinear mechanisms are present, time-domain methods are commonly used. In this talk we re-examine the use of numerical time-stepping methods with such audio-rate sound output in mind. After a brief overview of such methods, and the presentation of a variety of examples, spanning the full range of virtual acoustics and musical instrument models, attention is turned to practical matters---viewed from the point of view of audio-rate simulation. These include: numerical accuracy, and how this idea aligns with conventional notions such as “order of accuracy” of a given numerical method; methods of ensuring numerical stability for low-loss and possibly strongly nonlinear systems and over long simulation durations; and efficiency, especially for very large problem sizes. Many video and audio demonstrations will be presented.
Biography
Stefan Bilbao (B.A. Physics, Harvard, 1992, MSc., PhD Electrical Engineering, Stanford, 1996 and 2001 respectively) was born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. He is currently Professor of Acoustics and Audio Signal Processing in the Acoustics and Audio Group at the University of Edinburgh. He previously held positions at the Sonic Arts Research Centre, at the Queen's University Belfast, and the Stanford Space Telecommunications and Radioscience Laboratory, and held a fellowship at the Ecole Normale Superieure, in Paris, funded by Harvard University, during which time he worked at the Institut de Recherche et Coodination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM).
He has led the NESS project (ERC-StG-270068-NESS: Next Generation Sound Synthesis) and WRAM project (ERC-PoC:737574-WRAM: Wave-based Room Acoustics Modeling), both funded by the European Research Council, and running jointly between the Acoustics and Audio Group and the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre at the University of Edinburgh between 2012 and 2018. He is a senior member of the IEEE and has been an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Audio Speech and Language Processing and the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America Express Letters. He is author or coauthor on more than 200 publications, including two monographs. He was awarded the Foreign Medal of the French Acoustical Society in 2022.
Main research interests are: physics-based sound synthesis; 3D room acoustics simulation; spatial audio encoding; virtual analog modeling; and machine learning for audio applications. More generally, he is interested in the application of numerical methods to problems in audio and acoustics, and works closely with composers of electronic music.