A real‐time music synthesis engine for physical modeling of plucked string instruments.

Abstract

Music synthesis continues to offer huge potential possibilities for the creation of new musical instruments. One of the promising music synthesis techniques is physical modeling which produces output sounds that resemble much more closely their physical counterparts since it offers the potential of more intuitive control. However, this results in tremendous computational and I/O requirements, prohibiting real‐time use in composition and live performance. To meet the performance requirements, we introduce a parallel processing engine. Whereas commercial digital signal processors such as TI TMS320C6x families use silicon area for large multiported register files, large caches, and deeply pipelined functional units, our parallel processing engine contain many more simple processing elements (PEs) for the same silicon area. As a result, our engine often employs thousands of PEs while possibly distributing and colocating PEs with the data I/O to minimize storage and data communication requirements. In this paper, we implemented physical modeling of a representative plucked Korean string instrument, called Gayageum, which has 12 silk strings. Our engine achieved 12‐notes music synthesis in real‐time at 44.1 kHz sampling rate for the physical modeling algorithms. This is in contrast to TI TMS320C6x, which achieves only single‐note music synthesis. [Work supported by KOSEF, R01‐2008‐000‐20493‐0.]