Tides at the Inaugural Signal Processing Summit

Last week I attended and presented at the inaugural Signal Processing Summit near San Jose, California and it was a great success. Many, many thanks to Stephane Boucher for organizing such a lovely conference and bringing a great group of talented people together. It was nice to meet a diverse group of signal processing experts from different domains, including audio, communications, and radar. I learned a lot from the other speakers' presentations and from conversations between sessions and over meals.

This was also my second time meeting Dan Boschen after last month's GNU Radio Conference in Everett, WA. It was Dan that first suggested I present at this conference.

I presented about "Sonifying the Tides"¹, with more focus on mechanical tide computers, tidal physics, and some neat signal processing aspects of predicting the tides. In particular, the Levine-Vicanek oscillator described by Rick Lyons in 2023 on provided a very substantial performance boost to my tide prediction program (an 87% decrease in total run-time) compared to calling the C standard library cos() function for generating sinusoid waves and 3.5 hours of tide audio. An even better improvement was obtained by using Chebychev's recurrence relation for cosine. I will write more on both methods and their stability in a future post…

Overall, I think my presentation was well received and I was asked great questions both during and after my talk.

Here are the slides I presented.

I will also be recording a version of this talk for the 2025 Online DSP Conference. That conference will include versions of all the in-person presentations and a few more speakers, including Randy Yates. Randy was the second person to suggest I present, and I'm very glad I did.

This all started after I fell in love with the mechanical tide computer at the Pacific Science Center in 2016 when I worked there as an Exhibit Technician. Unfortunately, that exhibit was recently removed from their floor.

Thankfully, Bill Nitsche at the University of Washington School of Oceanography was very generous with his time and willing to show me the mechanical tide computer and Puget Sound model they still have there. That meant I was able to include a video of the machine in action during my talk, and that was very helpful for explaining its operation.