How to become a digital audio engineer?

#1

Hi guys!
I post here a couple of questions that I've asked to Johannes privately. He suggested me to ask these questions on the forum so that also many of you can answer or share their experience about this topic. I hope so because it's very important for me.

"Hi Johannes,
I met you during the Maker Faire in Rome and I would like to congratulate with you for your work. I am italian and I am attending the last year of master degree in electronic engineering in Politecnico di Torino. I love music (I sing and play the guitar) and I chose electronic engineering to join my passion with a technical knowledge. So I hope one day to work in the field of digital audio. During these years I have attended only one course about digital audio processing and now I'm thinking about the master thesis. Another problem is that in Italy there isn't a specifical master degree on digital audio but several post-degree university courses (in Rome, Milan, ...) and no-university courses (SAE, ecc..). Do you have any suggestion about how I can improve my knowledge in audio processing? Do you know any other courses or masters that I could attend in the future (also outside Italy)? And what about after the studies? So which was your educational path? I know that it is very important the personal effort and the personal researches especially in this field.
I wish you all the best
Michele"

#2

Hi Mikgiak,

I believe engineering is a solid background for audio-dsp, because many fields meet: physics, acoustics, signals, mathematics, electronics, programming. I obtained a master degree in electronic engineering (long time ago), but have no further formal education in audio or DSP.

If you have the freedom, choose an audio-related topic for your master thesis? I worked on realtime polyphonic pitch recognition (in 1999). This is a very difficult problem, since the harmonics overlap heavily, and music signals can be really wild. When playing a single string on guitar, there is fret noise, the other strings resonating, the part of the string between the nut and the fingered fret resonating, body resonance, possibly palm muting, and subtle pitch bending, and that's only a single string. Even when I did not develop a commercially viable solution for real-time polyphonic pitch recognition, I developed an imperfect but functional real-time demo using multirate filterbank analysis and some heuristics. I could show the jury that an apparently simple problem is really not so simple, and a solution requires balancing trade-offs.

I believe Axoloti can be a nice tool to develop a master thesis. Many objects and techniques can be added to the library, that can align very well with a master thesis topic in electronic engineering.

I don't have a clear view on available courses, or clear suggestion how/where to learn more. So I'd love to hear others' recommendations here!

#3

Coursera.org offers a free online course called Audio Signal Processing for Music Applications, that could be a part of your journey. Its a mixture of lectures and programming assignments utilising the programming language Python. I think the topics are mainly based around the Direct Fourier Transformation. You can now enroll for the class that is starting in September.

#5

If you are thinking of becoming digital audio engineer in that case you can take help of the experts from EduHelpHub where the free online course can help you to gain knowledge in the field. Based on my personal experience, I have gained most of the knowledge from workshops and internships.