Photo by Sharon McCutcheon / Unsplash

Audio plugins are great tools for musicians and sound engineers to enhance their music and take it to another level. One way to create a variety of audio effects is with the programming language Faust. Programs like applications, mobile apps, and even externals for ChucK, Max/MSP and more can be all be made through functional programming.

To see just what kind of sound design you can achieve in Faust, listen to these creative digital audio submissions made by students from the course Real-Time Audio Signal Processing in Faust offered by Stanford University.


Zhe Zhang

For his project, student Zhe Zhang created a PureData patch by combining several externals generated in Faust. View his project here.

“FAUST is a powerful tool for audio processing, especially for its compiling support on various platforms. In this case I exported a basic Karplus-Strong algorithm as a VST plugin and loaded it in FL Studio.”

Pavlo Apisov

For this assignment, students had to create a polyphonic synthesizer. Here student Pavlo Apisov codes an audio track using Faust and FL Studio in Firefox via loopMIDI. View his project here.

Carole Chargueron

This submission is another example of a polyphonic synthesizer. Student Carole Chargueron adds her own spin by incorporating an additive sawtooth synth for unique sounds. View her project here.

“Put 2 sawtooths for the fundamental with a 2Hz beats for the second one, and added a second sawtooth for the 5th with a detune.”

Yaron Faxi Nadu Eshkar

Here student Yaron Eshkar implements a subtractive synthesizer with multiple different filters, showcasing a smooth modulation effect. View his project here.

“Faust coursework example utilizing peaking filters, LFO modulators and effects. Demonstrating movement through tweaking of the modulation reates.”

Chenzhong Hou

Student Chenzhong Hou programs a “strummable” string instrument with the Karplus-strong algorithm. View his project here.


You can check out more student work from all our courses by heading to our Gallery. Interested in learning Faust and developing audio effects of your own? Join the course below!

Real-Time Audio Signal Processing in Faust

Stanford University

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