ECE4893A: Electronics for Music Synthesis (Spring 2010)

ECE4893A: Electronics for Music Synthesis (Spring 2010)

Chris Garyet testing his voltage-controlled wah circuit
Office: Centergy 5212 (but I’m almost never there)
Phone: 404-385-2548 (but I almost never answer it)
E-mail:
lanterma@ece.gatech.edu (by far
the best way to reach me; please include “EMS” somewhere in the subject of class-related
e-mail so I can find it quickly)
Course website:
users.ece.gatech.edu/~lanterma/ems10
Prerequisites: ECE3040 and ECE3041 (with concurrency allowed,
i.e. you can
be taking ECE3041 this semester and be OK). Basically, I need some
familiarity with op amps, diodes, and transistors, and I need to make sure that
you have had some experience using a scope by
the time you will to use one in EMS. (Oscilloscopes are
introduced pretty early in ECE3041, which is
what makes the “concurrency” part OK)
Website for previous offering:
EMS (Spring 2008) –
will help give you a feel for what the class is like

The photo: Chris Garyet testing his voltage-contolled “wah” circuit
(from Spring 2006)

 

(Note: I often abbreviate the class title as “EMS.” This usage of “EMS”
should not be confused with
“EMS” as in Electronic Music
Studios, the makers of many classic synthesizers such as the Synthis.)

Grading:
Grades will be based on a series of written homeworks and possibly a few
simple
lab assignments, an in-class quiz given about 2/3 of the way through the
semester that
will be weighted the same as a homework, and the quality of a final project in
which you will design and build a module for a modular synthesizer.
I consider the project to be the most important thing in the class;
hence, your course grade will max out at whatever your project grade is,
e.g., if you do B work on the homeworks, etc., but turn in an A project,
you might get an A for the class, or you might get a B;
but if you do A work on everything else but turn in B level project,
your grade won’t be an A.

Aaron’s SDIY Pages

Homeworks

Lectures

Dear readers from outside the class:
If you find these
lectures useful, please consider making a small donation (maybe $25 or
thereabouts, although any amount is appreciated)
to the Georgia Tech Foundation earmarked to go towards
my synthesizer research; the funds will go towards parts and equipment
for student projects.
Here
are instructions on how to donate.

Since this is a lecture/lab class, I will only lecture for 2/3 of the class
periods, and that lecturing will be “front loaded,” i.e. I will lecture for
the first 2/3 of the class, and the last 1/3 of the class you will be just
working on your final projects, with me dropping by the lab to help out as
much as I can.

If you look at the lectures from the
Spring 2008 version
of
the course, you will get a pretty good idea of what we will cover in the
future.

References

We will draw material from numerous sources: book, articles, patents,
and particularly schematics and descriptions posted on websites. Think of
google as the main class text. Here’s some
good ones: