I am Stefano Tronci, a Science, GNU/Linux and Open Source enthusiast from Italy. I am a Physicist specialised in Acoustics.
I was born in 1990 and I have been hooked into computers since I was 4 years old, when an Amiga 500 was brought into the house.
I have been using GNU/Linux from the age of 11, and GNU/Linux exclusively as my operating system of choice since 2009.
I always been interested in science and music, consuming popular science books and documentaries by Piero and Alberto Angela, which are among the most famous and talented science popularisers in my home country. My interest in music developed in the realm of electric guitar, covering styles such as Blues and Soul. I have been mentored by talented teachers in my home town such as Renato Podestà and Riccardo Ferranti.
At the age of 18, while having a guitar lesson with Riccardo, I realised that the world of Science and that of Music largely intersect in the realm of Acoustics and Signal Processing, the disciplines at the core of physical modelling sound synthesis, a technique that was flourishing at the time in the Audio Software world.
As a consequence, I enrolled at the Physics Department of UNIPV. At first, University shocked me. During my previous education (except for music) I got used to memorise notions and repeat them to teachers. This did not work in the slightest at University. What our teachers demanded was radically different. We did have to learn the notions, but we were tasked with being creative with them. We had to step outside the notions and use them to produce solutions to problems we never seen. But also, we had to be critical, understand how to design and execute experiments, use them to understand where the predictive power of a theory ends, and be ready to accept to have to reject a theory. In short, we were being educated with knowledge with the goal of becoming able to extend it, refine it and redefine it. For this reason, whilst struggling in my first years (passing only 3 out of 10 exams), I developed more and more love and interest for Physics and I could not think of abandoning it. Eventually, I finally concluded my studies with a dissertation about the functional transformation method for digital sound synthesis through physical modelling, applied to electric guitar. Whilst every teacher (and course mate) has been crucial in my education during my years at UNIPV, I am very thankful to Gianni Gilardi for not letting me pass the Mathematical Analysis classes until I was proficient enough, to Andrea Negri for cementing my interest in Linux and Oreste Nicrosini for being my dissertation supervisor.
After my Bachelor’s I enrolled on the Audio Acoustics Master Program at Salford University, Manchester, UK. It was a fairly intensive one year long course in which I learnt about sound generation and propagation, speaker design, room acoustics, psychoacoustics and DSP to name a few. I graduated with a dissertation about black box modelling of non-linear audio systems supervised by Phil Duncan, to which I am grateful. It was a great experience in which, together with studying what I love, I had the privilege to meet great like minded people from all over the world.
Straight after the end of my Master I started working as an Acoustic Engineer in the consumer audio world, with a focus on wearable noise cancelling devices. At the same time, I became more involved in the Audio Open Source world. Mentored by Vladimir Sadovnikov I joined the LSP project, to which I contributed utility and profiling plugins (make not mistake, Vladimir does all the heavy lifting on the project). I am currently a Senior Acoustic Research engineer in the domain of ultrasonic mid-air haptics.
My adventure in the world of Science, Sound and Acoustics has just started, and I am always keeping alive my interests in these and many more disciplines, including Numerical Analysis, Machine Learning and Computer Science. I believe that crafting ourselves through knowledge and study is the most important aspect of life. I strive everyday to learn new things and apply them in my personal projects as well as my professional life. I hope that this blog will serve to share what I learn!
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