Victor Lazzarini

Victor Lazzarini, Joseph Timoney

The state variable filter configuration is a classic analogue design which has been employed in many electronic music applications. A digital implementation of this filter was put forward by Chamberlin, which has been deployed in both software and hardware forms. While this has proven to be a straightforward and successful digital filter design, it suffers from some issues, which have already been identified in the literature. From a modified Chamberlin block diagram, we derive the transfer functions describing its three basic responses, highpass, bandpass, and lowpass. An analysis of these leads to the development of an improvement, which attempts to better shape the filter spectrum. From these new transfer functions, a set of filter equations is developed. Finally, the approach is compared to an alternative time-domain based re-organisation of update equations, which is shown to deliver a similar result.

Victor Lazzarini, Joseph Timoney

This paper re-appraises the role of analogue computers within electronic and computer music and provides some pointers to future areas of research. It begins by introducing the idea of analogue computing and placing in the context of sound and music applications. This is followed by a brief examination of the classic constituents of an analogue computer, contrasting these with the typical modular voltage-controlled synthesiser. Two examples are presented, leading to a discussion on some parallels between these two technologies. This is followed by an examination of the current state-of-the-art in analogue computation and its prospects for applications in computer and electronic music.

Steven Yi, Victor Lazzarini, Edward Costello

This paper describes Web Assembly Audio Worklet (WAAW) Csound, one of the implementations of WebAudio Csound. We begin by introducing the background to this current implementation, stemming from the two first ports of Csound to the web platform using Native Clients and asm.js. The technology of Web Assembly is then introduced and discussed in its more relevant aspects. The AudioWorklet interface of Web Audio API is explored, together with its use in WAAW Csound. We complement this discussion by considering the overarching question of support for multiple platforms, which implement different versions of Web Audio. Some initial examples of the system are presented to illustrate various potential applications. Finally, we complement the paper by discussing current issues that are fundamental for this project and others that rely on the development of a robust support for WASM-based audio computing.