Distortion (music)

Distortion and overdrive are forms of audio signal processing used to alter the sound of amplified electric musical instruments, usually by increasing their gain, producing a "fuzzy", "growling", or "gritty" tone. Distortion is most commonly used with the electric guitar, but may also be used with other electric instruments such as electric bass, electric piano, synthesizer and Hammond organ. Guitarists playing electric blues originally obtained an overdriven sound by turning up their vacuum tube-powered guitar amplifiers to high volumes, which caused the signal to distort. While overdriven tube amps are still used to obtain overdrive, especially in genres like blues and rockabilly, a number of other ways to produce distortion have been developed since the 1960s, such as distortion effect pedals. The growling tone of a distorted electric guitar is a key part of many genres, including blues and many rock music genres, notably hard rock, punk rock, hardcore punk, acid rock, and heavy

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On the Use of Masking Models for Image and Audio Watermarking

Justin Picard, Arnaud Robert

In most watermarking systems, masking models, inherited from data compression algorithms, are used to preserve fidelity by controlling the perceived distortion resulting from adding the watermark to the original signal. So far, little attention has been paid to the consequences of using such models on a key design parameter: the robustness of the watermark to intentional attacks. The goal of this paper is to demonstrate that by considering fidelity alone, key information on the location and strength of the watermark may become available to an attacker; the latter can exploit such knowledge to build an effective mask attack. First, defining a theoretical framework in which analytical expressions for masking and watermarking are laid, a relation between the decrease of the detection statistic and the introduced perceptual distortion is found for the mask attack. The latter is compared to the Wiener filter attack. Then, considering masking models widely used in watermarking, experiments on both simulated and real data (audio and images) demonstrate how knowledge on the mask enables to greatly reduce the detection statistic, even for small perceptual distortion costs. The critical tradeoff between robustness and distortion is further discussed, and conclusions on the use of masking models in watermarking drawn.

2005

Over-the-Air Computation via Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface

Wei Chen, Yuning Jiang

Over-the-air computation (AirComp) is a disruptive technique for fast wireless data aggregation in Internet of Things (IoT) networks via exploiting the waveform superposition property of multiple-access channels. However, the performance of AirComp is bottlenecked by the worst channel condition among all links between the IoT devices and the access point. In this paper, a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) assisted AirComp system is proposed to boost the received signal power and thus mitigate the performance bottleneck by reconfiguring the propagation channels. With an objective to minimize the AirComp distortion, we propose a joint design of AirComp transceivers and RIS phase-shifts, which however turns out to be a highly intractable non-convex programming problem. To this end, we develop a novel alternating minimization framework in conjunction with the successive convex approximation technique, which is proved to converge monotonically. To reduce the computational complexity, we transform the subproblem in each alternation as a smooth convex-concave saddle point problem, which is then tackled by proposing a Mirror-Prox method that only involves a sequence of closed-form updates. Simulations show that the computation time of the proposed algorithm can be two orders of magnitude smaller than that of the state-of-the-art algorithms, while achieving a similar distortion performance.

IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC2021

Media Aware Routing in Large Scale Networks with Overlay

Pascal Frossard, Dan Jurca, Sofija Petrovic

This paper presents a new routing strategy, that selects the best network paths in an overlay network, in order to minimize the distortion perceived by the end user. We first propose a model that reports the video distortion as a function of the encoding rate, and the loss process parameters (the packet loss ratio, and the average burst length of errors). We then derive a method to compute an accurate estimation of the end-to-end characteristics of a given path in the network topology, as experienced by the media stream. It allows for reducing a set of streaming paths between the server and the client, to a simple virtual link with equivalent end-to-end parameters. Finally, an algorithm is proposed, that finds the best streaming paths in the overlay network, in terms of media distortion. Our algorithm therefore takes into account not only the conventional network parameters (e.g. end-to-end available bandwidth), but also other application specific metrics (e.g. video distortion measure and loss process). Interestingly, it is shown that the best route in terms of video distortion, does not necessarily use the highest bandwidth links, but carefully trades off channel reliability and bandwidth.

2005

Effects unit

An effects unit or effects pedal is an electronic device that alters the sound of a musical instrument or other audio source through audio signal processing. Common sound effects include distortion

Heavy metal music

Heavy metal (or simply metal) is a genre of rock music that developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, largely in the United Kingdom and United States. With roots in blues rock, psychedelic rock

Guitar amplifier

A guitar amplifier (or amp) is an electronic device or system that strengthens the electrical signal from a pickup on an electric guitar, bass guitar, or acoustic guitar so that it can produce sound

EE-348: Electroacoustics

Ce cours a pour objectif de former les étudiants de section Génie Electrique et Electronique à la conception de systèmes acoustiques, à l'aide d'un formalisme basé sur l'électrotechnique. A la fin du semestre, les étudiants seront capables de dimensionner, entre autres, des filtres acoustiques.

EE-296: Electrical systems and electronics II

Les concepts de base permettant de comprendre et d'analyser les systèmes électroniques dédiés à l'acquisition et au traitement des signaux (signaux physiologique, bio-capteurs) seront abordés en théorie et en pratique. Cela englobe l'amplification, le filtrage et l'acquisition des ces signaux.

EE-332: Electronic circuits and systems II

L'étudiant maîtrise la conception et la mise en oeuvre des circuits et systèmes électroniques sous forme discrète et intégrée. L'accent est mis sur les applicationb dans le domaine des télécommunications.