The Emeraude team combines the skills of:
- the Center of Innovation in Telecommunication and Integration of Service (CITI) at INSA-Lyon (FPGAs, compilation, embedded systems, fixed-point arithmetic, etc.) and of
- GRAME - Centre National de Création Musicale (CNCM) research team (Domain Specific Languages, audio Digital Signal Processing, Human Computer Interaction, etc.)
to foster the development of new programming tools and signal processing techniques for embedded audio systems.
Programming embedded systems for real-time audio signal processing requires a deep understanding of Digital Signal Processing (DSP), low-level programming, system architecture, etc. Few engineers (whether they are on the DSP or the programming side), "makers," artists, etc. fully master all these domains. One of the main assumption of Emeraude is that Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) are a major technical evolution to facilitate and enable audio programming on emerging embedded systems.
Emeraude is studying various forms of embedded systems such as small microcontrollers, DSPs, GPUs, Linux-based embedded systems, etc. and has a special focus on FPGAs. FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays) can help solving current limitations of traditional computing platforms used for musical, artistic, and acoustics applications, especially in terms of audio latency, number of audio inputs and outputs, sampling rate, etc.
Beyond that, Emeraude is also interested in the various applications enabled by and related to the aforementioned research developments in a wide range of fields: active control and physical modeling of room acoustics and musical instruments, haptic feedback, artificial intelligence, spatial audio, digital musical instruments, etc.