This year, I had the opportunity to be a co-author with Kurt Werner and Ezra J. Teboul on a DAFX 2022 paper, Modeling and Extending the RCA Mark II Sound Effects Filter.
This project began as a collaboration between Kurt, as part of his role on iZotope’s research team, and the Columbia University Computer Music Center, aiming to learn about the one of a kind gear the Center had preserved over decades and model it in modern software to make it accessible to everyone. Kurt brought his expertise in Wave Digital Filters (WDFs) to the task, and I supported early modeling efforts by building a library in C++ which let him build his WDF prototypes much more quickly.
Eventually, it became evident that to fulfill the project’s goals of releasing the models to the general public, they would need to be implemented without use of iZotope’s internal toolsets. Since I had been involved early in the project, Kurt reached out to me for some additional technical support once he and Ezra were writing up the final drafts, and this work is officially my contribution to the published paper.
As part of the conclusions of the paper, we needed to show a comparison between the behavior of the model, and the behavior of the original circuit, to demonstrate that they are very similar. The only available data showing the frequency response of the original filter, however, was a hand-drawn plot in an old scanned pdf of the original device manual. I spent the time creating CSV files for every filter response curve, so that they could be plotted on top of the model’s behavior in the final paper.
This was my first time as a co-author on a published paper, and attending DAFX. I’m glad to have had this opportunity, as it is a fantastic conference and community to be part of.