FPGA-based sound synthesis by digital waveguide

Abstract

This paper address the issues involved in physical modelling synthesis using digital waveguides and its implementation in the hardware. Physical modelling of a one-dimensional musical resonator such as a string can be derived using digital waveguide modelling. The digital waveguide model itself comprises of pair of delay lines. This research models the string digital waveguide using an IIR filter to model the loss parameter and an all-pass filter to handle the fractional number of delays. This paper covers the implementation of digital waveguide string model in FPGA board. Applying a scaling and saturation methods, the design approach ensure that the bit overflow would not occur. Applied to the Cyclone II EP2C35F672C6 FPGA on Altera's DE2 board, it uses a total of 1243 registers which are 4% of the total register found on the FPGA.