You can listen to the winning song here.
"We appreciated the pleasing timbre of the synthetic instruments and the use of audio effects in both the obligatory Bohemian Rhapsody and the student's choice of Propane Nightmares. The jury especially appreciated the percussion, which sounds very natural here," commented the jury's verdict Prof. Roman Čmejla from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering.
Adrian Pitoňák enrolled in the competition as part of his semester project in the course Audio Signal Synthesis. He was also interested in the elective course because in August he received a small MIDI controller with a range of two octaves and drum pads from his girlfriend. An enthusiastic listener of electronic music, especially of the grime and jazz genres, he got hooked on playing and eventually became interested in music theory.
Adrian Pitoňák would recommend the Synth Challenge to anyone who has a relationship with music and wants to go deeper. "The huge advantage is that you don't need any prior knowledge of music theory to start synthesizing instruments. And if someone is already proficient in it, they can deepen their knowledge in the competition," says this year's winner.
The path to technology development can lead through popular music
When selecting songs, the jury takes into account their attractiveness, so this year's compulsory songs include Bohemian Rhapsody and Mission Impossible.
"Both of this year's pieces incorporate a wide range of different types of sounds - from keyboards, strings and wind instruments to a variety of percussion to choir and reeds. Although the main output of the competition is audio synthesis, to successfully program it, students must also be proficient in methods of analysis and digital signal processing," explains Prof Čmejla, who believes that students can use the skills they have acquired practically in the design and development of technologies in other fields, such as communications or biomedicine.
In the past years, the participants had to synthesize, among others, Smetana's Vltava, the Beatles' Yellow Submarine or the theme tune from the series "Murder in Midsomer", where the main instrument used is the theremin - an electronic musical instrument.
Python will be added next year
Starting next year, the Synth Challenge is considering expanding to include the Python programming environment. The Python language is more easily accessible not only to FEL students, who have been exposed to it since the first semester, but also to other undergraduate students. The organisers hope to involve other university departments, increase the number of participants and increase interest in the study of acoustic and audio-visual programmes and subjects.
The overall results of this year's Synth Challenge 2021 are available at http://sami.fel.cvut.cz/synthchallenge2021/results/
About the Synth Challenge
Open to all university students who submit three problems created in MATLAB. In the first task, students choose a synthesis of musical instruments in one of two pre-prepared compositions, in the second task they generate three octaves of a major musical scale with synthetic musical instruments, and in the third task they present any custom implementation of audio synthesis or audio effects. The solution makes use of so-called MIDI protocols, which store information about musical notation and with which musical compositions can be generated without knowledge of music notation or music theory.
Links to all 375 MATLAB audio synthesis submissions from past years can be found at the bottom of the competition page
