About me

I am a final year PhD student in the Acoustics and Audio Group (AAG) and CSTR at the University of Edinburgh, working on signal processing and machine learning models of audio effects.

My research is fully funded by the Scottish Graduate School of Arts and Humanities (SGSAH).

Publications

Journal articles

JAES-26 Gradient-based Optimisation of Modulation Effects
Alistair Carson, Alec Wright, Stefan Bilbao
accepted for the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society (JAES), publication due summer 2026.

TASLP-25 Resampling Filter Design for Multirate Neural Audio Effect Processing
Alistair Carson, Vesa Välimäki, Alec Wright, Stefan Bilbao
IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing vol. 33, pp. 2163-2174, 2025

Conference proceedings

DAFx25 Anti-aliasing of neural distortion effects via model fine-tuning
Alistair Carson, Alec Wright, Stefan Bilbao
Proc. 28th Int. Conf. on Digital Audio Effects (DAFx25), Ancona, Italy, Sept. 2025.

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ICASSP-25 Interpolation filter design for sample rate independent audio effect RNNs
Alistair Carson, Alec Wright, Stefan Bilbao
Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. Acoust. Speech and Signal Process. (ICASSP) Hyderabad, India, Apr. 2025

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ICASSP-25 Open-Amp: Synthetic data framework for audio effect foundation models
Alec Wright, Alistair Carson, Lauri Juvela
Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. Acoust. Speech and Signal Process. (ICASSP), Hyderabad, India, Apr. 2025

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DAFx24 Sample rate independent recurrent neural networks for audio effects processing
Alistair Carson, Alec Wright, Jatin Chowdhury, Vesa Välimäki, Stefan Bilbao
Proc. 27th Int. Conf. Digital Audio Effects (DAFx24), Guildford, UK, Sept. 2024

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DAFx24 Differentiable all-pole filters for time-varying audio systems
Chin-Yun Yu, Christopher Mitcheltree, Alistair Carson, Stefan Bilbao, Joshua D. Reiss, György Fazekas
Proc. 27th Int. Conf. on Digital Audio Effects (DAFx24), Guildford, UK, Sept. 2024

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DAFx24 Differentiable grey-box modelling of phaser effects using frame-based spectral processing
Alistair Carson, C. Valentini-Botinhao, Simon King, Stefan Bilbao
Proc. 26th Int. Conf. on Digital Audio Effects (DAFx23), Copenhagen, Denmark, Sept. 2023,

Thesis

Thesis Aliasing Reduction in Virtual Analog Modelling
Alistair Carson
MSc Thesis, The University of Edinburgh, Sept. 2020