Wookash Podcast Jan Wilczek | The Engineering Side of Sound
Jan 17, 2026
Jan Wilczek, a freelance audio developer and founder of WolfSound, dives deep into the engineering side of sound. He shares his journey from music to digital signal processing, highlighting the intricacies of sound conversion and synthesis techniques. Jan explores how different synthesis methods, like additive and subtractive, create unique audio textures. He discusses the role of neural networks in sound generation and the importance of C++ in audio development, making complex concepts both accessible and fascinating.
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From Music Kid To DSP Researcher
- Jan Wilczek described his journey from piano and guitar to acoustic engineering, DSP, and studying at FAU and Aalto University.
- He used internships, mentors, and a master thesis on physics-informed neural networks to move into audio development and teaching.
Audio Is Samples Between ADC And DAC
- Digital audio is samples captured by an ADC and processed as arrays of floats between -1 and 1.
- Programmers manipulate fixed-size buffers (e.g., 480 samples at 48kHz) between ADC and DAC for real-time processing.
Why Pure Additive Synthesis Struggles
- Additive synthesis builds sounds by summing sinusoids but becomes hard to control due to many degrees of freedom.
- The envelope and relative amplitudes of harmonics make additive synthesis computationally and musically challenging.