Henderson’s co-author on the paper is Justin Solomon, an X-Consortium Career Development Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Trevor Henderson in the record library at WMBR, MIT’s student radio station. Other musicians might use it to blend instruments and voice on stage or in the studio. DJs could also use the equipment to transition between tracks during live performances. ![]() He has already used the algorithm to build equipment that seamlessly transitions between songs on his radio show. “If it’s transforming one chord into a chord with a different harmony, or with more notes, for instance, the notes will split from the first chord and find a position to seamlessly glide to in the other chord.”Īccording to Henderson, this is one of the first techniques to apply optimal transport to transforming audio signals. “Optimal transport is used here to determine how to map pitches in one sound to the pitches in the other,” says Henderson, a classically trained organist who performs electronic music and has been a DJ on WMBR 88.1, MIT’s radio station. The algorithm also includes specialized techniques to maintain the fidelity of the audio signal as it transitions. Then, it finds the optimal way to move the pitches in each segment to pitches in the other signal, to produce the smooth glide of the portamento effect. The algorithm first breaks the audio signals into brief segments. In work that originated in a class project, Trevor Henderson, now a graduate student in computer science, applied optimal transport to interpolating audio signals - or blending one signal into another. Formulated in the 1700s, the framework has been applied to supply chains, fluid dynamics, image alignment, 3-D modeling, computer graphics, and more. The algorithm relies on “optimal transport,” a geometry-based framework that determines the most efficient ways to move objects - or data points - between multiple origin and destination configurations. His paper describing the algorithm won the “best student paper” award at the recent International Conference on Digital Audio Effects. In experiments, the algorithm seamlessly merged various audio clips, such as a piano note gliding into a human voice, and one song blending into another. Now an MIT student has invented a novel algorithm that produces a portamento effect between any two audio signals in real-time. But only instruments that can continuously vary in pitch - such as the human voice, string instruments, and trombones - can pull off the effect. In music, “portamento” is a term that’s been used for hundreds of years, referring to the effect of gliding a note at one pitch into a note of a lower or higher pitch. Image courtesy of the researchers Algorithm enables one audio signal to glide into another, recreating the “portamento” effect of some musical instruments. The algorithm finds the optimal way to move pitches from one signal into another to produce a smooth transition between sounds (shown here). An MIT-invented algorithm automatically produces a “portamento” effect - a pitch sliding from one note to another - between any two audio signals in real time.
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