Fossa: graphical control application for analysis, manipulation, and synthesis of digitised sound

Abstract: The art of music has been of great interest and pleasure for humans, through all times people have been eager to produce music and the beautiful tones have amazed us greatly. Today, a wide variety of different music styles offers a worldwide source of joy to mankind. Lately, the technology of computers has come to change the society in many different aspects, introducing new ways of presenting information. Of course, also music lovers have seen the potential in the new media and have taken action in developing systems for manipulating and transforming sound into digitised forms. The ability to store and manipulate sound on computer media opens new ways of producing and listening to music and speech. However, the process of converting music from analogue to digital format is not a trivial task. Advanced mathematical methods and great knowledge in the art of music have to be combined in a logical way not to change the format of the sound. Lippold Haken and Kelly Fitz have invented a new analysis/synthesis system for representing and manipulating sound called the Reassigned Bandwidth-Enhanced Additive Sound Model. Based on this new model, they also developed a C++ class library, called Loris, implementing analysis, manipulation, and synthesis of digitised sound. Apart from the classes and methods provided in Loris, the library also consists of several interfaces for different scripting languages and a C-linkable procedural interface. However, the Loris software only contains access to the new analysis/synthesis model via the use of programming languages, rather difficult to understand for music lovers with the lack of programming skills. The need to present Loris to non-programmers has set the foundation of this paper. The goal of the thesis is to design and develop a graphical control application to offer non-programmers the possibility to explore the functionalities found in Loris in a convenient way. This work has resulted in a design and implementation of a prototype application, named Fossa, distributed as part of the Loris project. The application consists of a graphical interface, which provides straightforward interaction for the user to exercise several of the functionalities found in Loris, without introducing the need for any programming knowledge from the users part. Fossa includes both a graphical representation of reassigned bandwidth enhanced analysis data as well as the ability to listen to results produced from such data, allowing the user to see and hear results from different manipulations. Finally, effort has been made to describing further work and ideas for continued development of the application.