Peter Mindek

nanographics

SUN 8:00 – 10:00

Over the past decades, synthesized sounds found their way into all sorts of music genres, such as rock, pop, techno, hip-hop, or even heavy metal. Unless you are exclusively listening to classical music, it’s very likely that significant chunks of your favourite jams are in fact a bunch of maths. In this workshop, we will explore the basics of sound synthesis, the mathematics behind it, and practical ways of how to make such sounds yourself from scratch. Through a hands-on approach, we will look at things such as waveforms, oscillators, filtering, and antialiasing. We will also discover that a lot of mathematical principles behind synthetic sounds look very familiar to us as computer-graphics experts, and we will look closely to the parallels between these two, closely related worlds. We might even make some music with a GPU.

Peter Mindek is a co-founder and CTO of nanographics, a scientific visualization studio based in Vienna, Austria. He received his doctoral degree in scientific visualization from TU Wien in 2015. As a post-doctoral researcher at TU Wien, he developed techniques for illustrative molecular visualization and storytelling. Currently, besides scientific visualization, his research interests include procedural animation and automated music generation for enhancing visual stories.