Physics-Based Sound Synthesis for Games and Interactive Systems

I had started to mess around with STK C++ classes which are used for many of the sound objects in the ChucK language.

ChucK is a little unusual but I got the hang of it enough to complete the course. I enjoyed the subjects a lot. I am an engineer and know a lot about sound and DSP, but I still learned quite a bit.

Some of my complaints are super picky, but anyway here they are:

While I appreciate the sense of humor of ChucK's developers, some terms were invented apparently simply to be "cute", e.g. ChucK programs are called "shreds" (why?) and so the process manager/scheduler is called a "shreduler" (why?). When one is attempting to absorb a lot of new info in a short period of time, this stuff gets in the way.

The assignments are apparently robo-graded and it was occasionally difficult to get direct feedback from the instructor(s) as to why a given approach was marked incorrect.

The forum was OK for chatting with other students about various aspects of assignments etc. but the instructors did not comment very frequently.

Sometimes I found the quizzes a little challenging as maybe I missed one minute out of 30 or more minutes of video, where the question was answered. Later I found there were closed captioning text files but it would be better if the lecture transcript could be made available as a PDF.

Assignments would also be better as PDFs because I wound up copying the text off the screen into a document and then printing it out so I could keep track of all the details.

Many of the assignments are based on a "PONG" framework. At first this is OK, but it got a little repetitive, and once there were more than 4 instruments being triggered at a time, it becomes really difficult to hear any sort of subtle change you might be making to the synthesis models.

Event though I didn't complete the course I would recommend it to anyone who wishes to explore the subject of sound modelling.

A mathematical background is not strictly required. The focus surely isn't on the maths in this course. But honestly, at some point I felt I should start all over again because I glossed over the maths too much.

The exercises were well designed. It was fun to work through them Also, since I'm a programmer that was the area where I felt most at ease.

Mr. Cook is a brilliant teacher. In a 30 minutes lecture he can motivate and put you on the right track to explore a topic that may take a good couple of extra hours to really understand. I also very much respect him for taking the time to check the forums every now and then and help us out with our questions.

I hope to continue / start over when I manage to dedicate some more time to study (I was in between jobs when I started).

Also kudos to the Kadenze crew, they're doing an awesome job.

I learned so much from this course and I appreciated it immensely. Professor Cook and his colleagues showed enormous caring and enthusiasm that were quite infectious. I learned much more than I anticipated. I got over my fear of coding, and enjoyed learning and exploring the Chuck language and its enormous potential.

Physical modeling is my favorite kind of synthesis, and it's very difficult to find a good place to learn about it. Professor Cook is an expert in the field and himself created very powerful tools which he clearly enjoys sharing with students.

He was also extremely helpful and responsive when I submitted questions online. I would recommend this course to anyone who is interested in learning about physical modeling synthesis.

This is a very impressive and informative course for understanding physics-based sound synthesis, especially modal synthesis.
The enthusiasm of the instructor is very inspiring and helps to go beyond the material of the course with your own solutions.
I managed to gain more insight and a more accurate understanding of old knowledge and found holes and wrongs in my previous knowledge.
However, the games and interactive systems aspect is not largely filled in, but it is not necessary.
So I would like to have more of physics-based sound synthesis and also construct modal filters for real-time use and shorten the title in this sense, leaving out the wording game and interactive systems.
On the other hand, Chuck is not very common nowadays, but as this is not crucial to understand, as it can be easily implemented in other modern CM languages, from CSound to Pd to Numpy and Scipy.

Thank you very much for this wonderful course!

winfried