Ryan Maguire

Acoustic signal mixtures from the environment often manifest interesting structural properties. These features can be used to generate musical forms, but access is a problem. Here, Probabilistic Latent Component Analysis (PLCA) has been used to automatically extract independent sources from a mixed signal of environmental sounds. Excitation information corresponding to the temporal evolution of independent acoustic sources in the original environment is extracted.

"moDernisT" was created by salvaging the sounds lost to mp3 compression from the song "Tom's Diner", famously used as one of the main controls in the listening tests to develop the MP3 encoding algorithm. Here we find the form of the song intact, but the details are just remnants of the original, scrambled artifacts hinting at what once was. This thesis discusses a series of compositions created over the past year that combine the use of external data with intuitive aesthetic decisions.