In a previous post, I discussed the physical interpretation of digital music (and all digital audio) as both a time-varying signal and a frequency-varying signal. This, of course, makes intuitive sense - as we spend three or four minutes listening to a song, we can hear the guitars and horns coming in and fading out, a singer intone the chorus of a song, etc. At the same time, we appreciate the frequencies changing as well — the singer hitting different notes, the instruments forming different chords. Understanding the time and frequency behavior of auditory information is fairly intuitive - in fact, one could even argue that visualizing the frequency-based content is more informative than visualizing the time-based content. ...

• photography
• dsp

The other day I was having a discussion with my roommate Mike about the physical intuition of digital photographs, and how performing even the most fundamental of operations (e.g. resizing) requires an appreciation of the underlying mathematics. We are both currently in image processing classes, but very different kinds. His course is in Computer Science, so his studies tend to be of the use Java; things happen; make apps variety, with only some slight motivation and understanding of what’s happening under the hood. My course, on the other hand, is in Electrical Engineering, which means it is of the here’s some math, and here’s how you do this math in Matlab variety. There’s advantages to both educational approaches, but debating the merits of theory- centric versus application-centric education styles is beyond the scope of this post. Instead I want to quickly motivate some of the fundamental theorems of Signal Processing and show how they are applied. In this post, I will cover the first, and most intuitive, of signals: audio. ...

• music
• dsp

I recently finished signing up for (hopefully) my final semester of (undergraduate) classes at University. I don’t think the significance of this coming semester being my final one has quite sunk in yet. Maybe it’s simply due to me already being in the middle of the semester now, but I haven’t yet begun panicking or experiencing ‘senioritis’. I’m sure those will both come in due time, but in the meantime, I had to figure out which classes to take to round up my college education. ...

• school

I love going for walks in the park. Whether I’m flushed with ideas and want to let them percolate in my head, or I’m bone dry and can’t seem to get a single thought to hit me, I find going for a walk always helps. Something about keeping moving and watching the world stroll by always seems to get the juices flowing at just the right pace. But a walk can’t be just anywhere to have this effect. Walking the city streets, for example, just doesn’t seem to have the same effect. Perhaps it has to do with the noise, or maybe it’s just the commotion of people rushing about trying to “get things done”. Either way, I demand my meditative gardens to be slightly removed from the most heavily trafficked paths so that I can (perhaps somewhat selfishly) enjoy their tranquility. (For instance, the Rutgers Student Center below might be a bit too active to get any good thinking done.) ...

• meta