Dario Sanfilippo, PhD

Exponential curves are particularly useful in digital audio as they provide natural-sounding amplitude variations, and they describe the behaviour of dis/charging capacitors in analogue RC circuits [Chamberlin 1985]. A common task, among others, is modelling analogue ADSR envelope generators, which are based on such circuits. Digital one-pole f... Read More

Faust is a high-level programming language for audio based on C++ where several implementation-related low-level issues are handled by the Faust compiler. However, Faust still allows for a certain degree of freedom in its operations that may result in undesired behaviours for the domain of audio streams. This blog post shows a few examples where... Read More

After a long silence, this post is about the implementation of not-so-simple recursive circuits in the Faust language. We will see a few relevant examples and the three main approaches that we can follow to implement a circuit: Faust’s diagram expressions (basic syntaxt), the with environment with auxiliary function definition, and the letrec en... Read More

As it often happens, you start the implementation of an algorithm that initially seems to be straightforward and eventually a number of challenges emerge, making the implementation more difficult and intriguing.This is what happened to me with the implementation of a windowless granulator based on zero-crossing (ZC) detection and delay lines. I ... Read More

This post is a follow-up to the previous post on granulators using zero-crossing (ZC) detection. Some information has already been discussed, but more details have been added here.The main idea behind a ZC granulator is that grains start and end at a ZC. ZC can be detected by observing the sign of the product between the current sample and the p... Read More

Discontinuities in granulators are commonly handled using windowing functions, though they sometimes create a recognisable sound and I was looking for alternative techniques.Zero-crossing (ZC) detection can be deployed to avoid discontinuities between grains.In Pure Data, I had already done some experiments last year with this technique using au... Read More

Implementing digital deterioration by increasingly unstable nonlinear feedback networks: an exploration of phase transitions in dynamical systemsIt’s been three months since I moved to Vienna and it feels like I moved here three days ago. The city is great, just as I remembered it, and I like the people I’m working with.Rotting Sounds, whose pro... Read More

About three years ago I was writing a goodbye post to Vienna; I was leaving the city to start my PhD in Edinburgh. After all this time, I can look back and be happy about that choice: Edinburgh is certainly not my favourite city but I’ve met some really nice people and we’ve done a very good job for my PhD together with my supervisors. My resear... Read More

I’ll be a guest at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki during 16th-23rd of April as part of a Staff Erasmus programme. I will present my research and we will have workshops and discussions about music complex adaptive systems and some DSP techniques related to the field. I will also give a concert with two of my works on the 18th of April. I hope t... Read More

A couple of years ago I implemented a fairly robust and certainly CPU-friendly algorithm for the time-domain estimation of the spectral tendency. It works by using a crossover to divide the input spectrum into two parts whose energy is measured through the RMS. The imbalance between the two spectra is what creates a negative feedback loop by shi... Read More

dariosanfilippo/pd-externalsFirst and last PD external of 2017: a band-limited impulse train which can be used to generate nicely sounding band-limited oscillators and modulations.Based on [Stilson and Smith 1996]: https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~stilti/papers/blit.pdf.Inlets are signal-only. Respectively: pulse frequency (Hz), number of harmonics (... Read More

Machine Milieu at SMC2017, Aalto University. We have a poster presentation and a fixed-media piece from one of our studio performance. Unfortunately, we couldn’t realise a live performance because Agostino was not able to join me and we didn’t manage to get an extra laptop for his patch. Otherwise, we would have been happy to let our machines pe... Read More

Some years ago, I started working on the implementation of lookahead limiters which I would then implement in my feedback networks for stability purposes. My original design was based on two side-chained amplitude curves: a fast one for attack transients and one for sustained sounds, which had to be slow enough as to avoid intermodulation distor... Read More

Variable delay lines and granular processing in Pure DataThis is a short post about the implementation of granulators using variable delay lines. There are several examples of delay line granulators in Pure Data so I am not trying to reinvent the wheel, but since I have investigated them a bit I thought that some could still be interested in the... Read More

These days, I’m trying to turn pretty much anything into a time-variant system so here is my experience with a 1-pole filter. What follows is a short blog post on a couple of days of work where I have experimented with different designs to find the best compromise for a filter whose cutoff frequency can be piloted by signals.A 1-pole filter, whi... Read More

On the 25th of November this year, I was invited to give a short talk and demonstration at the Digital Arts Symposium in Edinburgh about my research and latest developments of my PhD. I presented my idea of dynamical infrastructures and multi-adaptivity - probably one of the most important aspects of my research - which I will briefly introduce ... Read More

Me and my friend Mimmo “SEC_” Napolitano will play some concerts in England and France with our duo. I can’t wait to meet him as well as two other of our friends from Naples, the Les Énervés duo, with whom we’ll share the stage on some of our concerts. See below for details.10th of October - Cafè Oto, London. With Sudden Infant and Les Énervés.1... Read More

This post was originally published on Michael Edwards’ Miniblog (http://www.michael-edwards.org/noti), and it summarises my experience with Slippery Chicken when I composed a piece for the Slippery Chicken symposium at Goldsmiths University in London. I am now reposting this on my blog.————————&mda... Read More

LIES (sysmap) 1.0The photo above (kindly taken by Athena Zhu) is from the premier of the LIES (sysmap) 1.0 project, performed at the Edinburgh College of Art on the 28th of March 2016.This project builds on my previous performance LIES (topology/nodes) 2.0, although there are some substantial differences which make them two independent works.The... Read More

On the 4th of November I flew to L’Aquila to spend three days with Agostino Di Scipio. This was the second workshop we had for a duo we are working on; the first one was in June 2014.Both trips were a wonderful experience full of nice conversations and creative work. Di Scipio was my professor for my Master’s Degree in Naples for two years and w... Read More

Zero-crossing rate (ZCR) has successfully been implemented for the recognition of voiced and unvoiced speech (see for example [Shete et al. 2014]) or the detection of percussive sounds (see for example [Gouyon et al. 2000]). The reason is that ZCR has a correlation to noisy sounds as they are usually broadband signals with high-frequency compone... Read More

The brightness of a sound is usually linked to the spectral centroid and is commonly obtained through FFT analysis and the calculation of a weighted mean of the magnitude of the frequency components. In order to have an accurate result using this technique a relatively large analysis window is necessary and, in some cases, it might be computatio... Read More

I am at the airport in Oslo waiting for my connection flight, and this is probably a good moment to write this.Today I left Vienna to move to Edinburgh, and I am full of strong feelings making me nostalgic and excited at the same time.These ten months in Vienna were definitely some of the best in my life. The city is lovely and is one of the mos... Read More

The tour with SEC_ was a cool one. We had a great time together we’re both really happy about it. We played six concerts between Austria, Czech Republic and Germany. Overall all of them have been appreciated by the audience but we believe that some of them were fine, whereas some others were really well done. We’re also very happy about the fact... Read More

After the digital release, the album in duo with SEC_ is also out on CD on the french label Tsuku Boshi. Mimmo, besides being a great musician, is also one of my dearest friends, and it’s been cool to create this album with him. We have worked over several hours of recordings realised during 2012 and 2013 composing the pieces in studio ind... Read More

On the 4th of February at Stark Bewölkt, solo and duo with Birgit Ulher.  https://starkbewoelkt.wordpress.com/2014/12/12/mi-4-2-2015-dario-sanfilippo-birgit-ulher-john-eckhardt/ On the 5th of February solo at the University of Music and Theatre. http://www.hfmt-hamburg.de/studiengaenge/mmm/aktuelles/dario-sanfilippo/ Read More

Lately working on a project for Delta-Sigma modulation.  From top to bottom we have: input (sinewave), first-order modulator (1-bit) output, second-order modulator (1-bit) output, first-order quantisation error, second-order quantisation error, first-order integrator, second-order second integrator. The output of the integrators are those goin... Read More

Digital and CD version of my album with SEC_ is due to be published on the french label Tsuku Boshi. Listen to one of the tracks at the following link. Read More

Back home after sort of a short residency in Vienna, kindly supported by Kunst Radio. Me and my friend Peter Kutin have been asked for a composition whose theme was “fire/ice”. After we have realised our materials, me and Peter met in Vienna to work in the studio and compose a long composition which will be broadcast on the 26th of O... Read More

NEW FEEDBACK SYSTEM In the past years I have mostly used AudioMulch to implement my digital feedback systems. It’s a nice and well-written software, but it is not meant to give the users the possibility to operate in the low-level. That resulted in a strong limitation that slowly pushed me towards low-level softwares. Pure Data was one of ... Read More

New CD out on Die SchachtelIt’s a new CD containing the recording of Sculptures Musicales (Cage), performed in Naples in Dec 2012 by myself, Salvatore Carannante, Chiara Mallozzi and Stefano Silvestri, as well as an excerpt of my LIES (distance/incidence) solo in Vienna and other works by other authors such as Agostino Di Scipio, without w... Read More

11th Nov: duo with Tim Hodgkinson @The Horse Impro Club, London12th Nov: lecture with Tim Hodgkinson @Goldsmiths University, London13th Nov: workshop on complex dynamical music systems @nnnnn, London14th Nov: duo with Tim Hodgkinson @Richard Hoggart Building, Recital Room, London15th Nov: duo with Tim Hodgkinson @Club Integral, London16th Nov: d... Read More

Well, it’s just easy as that, I’m not an active poster, no matter if it’s Tumblr, Facebook or Twitter. Let me quickly summarise a few nice things that happened or that will happen soon. I had a great summer in my hometown, Campobello di Licata, where I could spend 3 weeks with my family. My brother has a lovely little daughter ... Read More

Here are some news about events in May and publications expected to be ready in the next weeks/months. I hope to see you around! May events 14.May.2013: Lecture and solo concert in Graz at IEM - Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics. http://iem.kug.ac.at/en/events.html 15.May.2013 (morning): Lecture in Vienna at University of Music ... Read More

These days I’ve been working on something I first proposed a year ago for an exam at the conservatory. It’s about achieving asynchronous granular synthesis by means of recursive processes, instead of random/stochastic ones. Consider a basic design for a granulator. You have a pointer going through the indexing of a buffer, and reader... Read More

Interview on Fluid Radio Read More

I’ve been spending more than 3 weeks in my hometown now, in Sicily, and it has been a very nice time with my family. My brother has a lovely 12 years old boy and a gorgeous little girl was born about two months ago. My mom, inevitably, made me gain a few more kilograms, and it’s gonna be easier to face winter. Besides this, I’v... Read More

These days I have implemented a kind of nonlinear distortion for a feedback system where the transfer function is the output signal itself. Thus we have feedback in the audio domain, as the output feeds back into the input through microphones, as well as in the control domain, as the shaping function is cyclicly updated with the transfered signa... Read More

It’s been a year now since I started my master’s degree in electronic music with Agostino Di Scipio at the Conservatory of Naples. I’m so happy for both the city I’m living in and the things I’m studying. Agostino, as I had no doubt even before starting this course, is an amazing theorist/composer/sound artist, and ... Read More

ICMC2012 Best Paper AwardThis year’s Best Paper Award at the International Computer Music Conference was given to our (me and Andrea Valle) paper “Towards a Typology of Feedback Systems”. Looking forward to be in Ljubljana in one week where we will present the above mentioned paper as well as another paper describing our duo pr... Read More

SD/OS (self-motion) will be running until 1st of June at Le Forme del Suono festival, Conservatory of Latina. Description: circular feedback network with two interacting loops, one with piezo and monitors, the other with mics and monitors. Both loops have the longest paths, i.e. in1-out2-in2-out3-in3-out1-in1, resulting in longer feedback delays... Read More

On Friday 4th of May I had the premier of LIES (distance/incidence) at the Conservatory of Naples. Unlike the LIES (inner variables) performance where the possible behaviours of the system are explored by modifying the internal system variables, in this new approach the behaviours are explored using microphones. Namely, the system has fixed inte... Read More

My sound installation running at Bangor Uni in a nice sounding ATC sound system. My paper presentation went also good and quite some nice people to hang out with. And Bangor is so lovely! Read More

INTER/actions symposiumTomorrow at Bangor University for a 3-days symposium. I’ll have a talk on the LIES project + the SD/OS (presence) sound installation. Read More

Me and Simone Pappalardo have collaborated in a sound installation for Altera festival where we put together his research on electro-magnetic fields and my feedback systems. Read More

The Institute for the Very Very Nervous had the pleasure to play with Thomas Lehn in Palermo at Goethe Institut. We performed Cage’s Sculptures Musicales and an improvisation we really enjoyed, and we’ve also had a great time together. Read More

Ph: Alessandro Achilli The Enterico trio small tour in Italy finished yesterday. It was a lovely experience. Read More

talk at queen mary university of londonNice experience in London at the 6th Digital Music Research Network. My talk went well and I’ve met nice people with interesting projects. Read More

My friend Andrea Arcella is curating a lecture at Naples’ University L'Orientale on “Questions Concerning Rhythm in Electro-Acoustic Music”. Me, Andrea and Salvatore Carannante will discuss some points, and namely I will talk about Emergent Rhythm Phenomena with examples from my project, my collaboration with Andrea Valle and o... Read More

I’ve spent some lovely days in Palermo with Tim Hodgkinson, Tristan Honsinger, Mary Oliver, Gandolfo Pagano and other friends. Me, Gandolfo and Tim had recording sessions and rehearsals for our trio, very satisfied of it. Then some other night, quite crazy sessions where Tristan and other musicians joined us. Great moments with great people. Read More

Audio Art Festival, KrakowAnd Audio Art Festival in Krakow was amazing too. A wonderful city, many interesting people and nice concerts. http://www.audio.art.pl/ Read More

Re-Volt Festival, RomeRe-Volt Festival was a very nice initiative. I’m glad I took part to it. Read More

PNEM Sound Art Festival, Uden, NLTwo of my recordings will be played at the PNEM festival on 5th and 6th of November. Read More

contemporary day (organized by AMACI)8th of October Acufene project live at Goethe Institute, Palermo. Read More