DUE TO THE COVID-19 EMERGENCY, THE SUMMER SCHOOL HAS BEEN CANCELLED
The theme of the SMC 2021 Summer School “Imaging Sound” will revolve around the audio-video integration. The course consists of four workshops, in which students will learn about the fundamental concepts, the state-of-the-art techniques and the numerical tools employed in selected areas that involve the interaction between sound and image under the guidance of leading experts in the field. The approach will balance theory and applications, and will allow the students to develop hands on experience in applications such as immersive virtual reality, sound design, computer animation, videogames and musical composition.
PERIOD
CANCELLED (originally scheduled for June 19-22, 2021.)
LOCATION
Torino, Italy.
PARTICIPANTS
The Summer School is open to up to 20 Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Audiovisual Studies, or Music Technology students enrolled in MA/MSc or PhD programs in universities or conservatories.
Participants will receive 1.5 ECTS credits upon successful completion of the program.
LANGUAGE
All the activities will be held in English.
PROGRAM DESCRIPTION
Day 1 - Acoustical simulation and auralization for acoustical design and immersive virtual reality
This workshop will cover the fundamentals of sound propagation and methods to simulate sound fields. The concept of auralization is introduced, which allows making virtual environments audible.
The workshop is rounded off by a practical exercise in which the students will learn to design and simulate a virtual room (e.g., a concert hall) using the modelling software SketchUp in combination with a plug-in for room acoustical simulation and auralization.
Day 2 - Audio-video integration in computer animation
This workshop aims at providing students an overview of techniques and methodologies used to design and develop computer graphics animations. Fundamentals of recording, editing, mixing and optimization of contents, depending on delivery support, will be presented in the first part of the workshop. The second part will focus on the video aspect. The main goal is to provide students with skills to animate 3D virtual characters and make videos in computer animation by means of modelling, animation, and rendering tools. Theoretical concepts will be immediately applied by considering several case studies implemented by the open software Blender.
Day 3 - Sound design for videogames
During the workshop, techniques and approaches utilized for real-time sound design for videogames will be presented. Starting from the dialogue with game designers and the continuous discussion with developers, all the aspects relative to the creation of soundtracks and dynamic sound effects will be tackled through the analysis of the techniques for middleware implementation within the game engine.
Day 4 - Fluid Corpus Manipulation: creative and programmatic approaches to sound banks
The Fluid Corpus Manipulation project (FluCoMA) is about enabling new ways of making music with ever-growing banks of sound and gestures by making available breakthroughs in DSP and machine learning in the environments used by creative coding musicians (Max, SuperCollider, PureData and the command line). These will come in two toolboxes, the first focuses on signal decomposition. The second toolbox extends this by providing tools for working with and exploring our sound banks.
The workshop will take the users through the first toolbox, In the second part of the day, we will give a sneak preview of a beta version of the second toolset, allowing the participants to experiment with various methods to observe, query, hybridise and interpolate their newly expanded sound banks.
ACTIVITIES
Each one-day workshop is self-consistent: it starts with a general introduction to the topic and tools, followed by hands-on experiences on practical examples. The background knowledge and the HW/SW requirements for an effective participation to each workshop will be specified to the applicants in advance.
Participants will have the opportunity to attend the SMC 2021 conference in the three days following the Summer School. Information on the online SMC 2020 conference are available at the following link: https://smc2020torino.it/uk/
Social events and instruction visits will be organized during the Summer School period.
ABOUT SMC
The Sound and Music Computing Conference and Summer School, SMC, is an annual international event promoted by the Sound and Music Computing Network https://smcnetwork.org
The SMC 2020 virtual event and the SMC 2021 event are jointly organized by Conservatorio Giuseppe Verdi di Torino (School of Electronic Music), Università di Torino (Dipartimento di Discipline Artistiche, musicali e dello spettacolo) and Politecnico di Torino (Dipartimento Energia, Dipartimento di Automatica e Informatica).
PARTICIPATION FEES
Selected participants will be offered free attendance to the SMC 2021 Summer School.
Those who wish to attend the SMC 2021 Conference (June 23th-25th 2021) should pay the applicable Conference Registration Fee through the Conference website.
APPLICATION
Further information on teaching staff, application procedures, etc. will be made available in the last quarter of 2020.