Tools for Sound Processing
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Amplitude
Sound File
Playlist
Region
References
Scalings
Figure 8: A snapshot of a typical ProTools c editing session
In fig. 8, a collection of soundfiles is aligned on the time axis according to a
playlist indicating the starting time and duration of each soundfile reference
(i.e. a pointer to the actual soundfile). Notice the on-the-fly amplitude rescaling
of some of the soundfiles
Graphical sound editors are extremely widespread on most hardware plat-
forms: while there is no current favourite application, each platform sports one
or more widely used editors which may range from the US$ 10000 professional
editing suites for the Apple Macintosh to the many Free Software programs for
unix workstations. In the latter category, it is worthwile to mention the snd ap-
plication by Bill Schottstaedt
which features a back-end processing in CLM.
More precisely, sounds and commands can be exchanged back and forth between
CLM and snd, in such a way that the user can choose at any time the most
adequate between inline and language-based processing.
B.4.2
Analysis/Resynthesis Packages
Analysis/Resynthesis packages belong to a closely related but substantially dif-
ferent category: they are generally medium-sized applications which offer differ-
ent editing capabilities. These packages are termed analysis/resynthesis pack-
ages because editing and processing is preceded by an analysis phase which
extracts the desired parameters in their most significant and convenient form;
editing is then performed on the extracted parameters in a variety of ways and
after editing, a resynthesis stage is needed to re-transform the edited parameters
into a sound in the time domain. In different forms, these applications do: (i)
perform various types of analyses on a sound (ii) modify the analysis data (iii)
resynthesize the modified analysis.
Many applications feature a graphical interface that allows direct editing in
the frequency-domain: the prototypical application in this field is Audiosculpt
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