Wikipedia defines an audio transient as "a high amplitude, short-duration sound at the beginning of a waveform that occurs in phenomena such as musical sounds, noises or speech". Here's an example that points out the transients in a short snippet of audio:

So, a transient is just a peak that occur…

I've been spending a good amount of time working on a phase vocoder lately. I'm happy to say I have an early working demo version that sounds quite good.

The phase vocoder allows for stretching and compressing the time duration of audio (as shown in the waveforms above) without changing the pitch…