Hot topics in musical acoustics applied to real-time sound synthesis

Abstract

(Invited paper for an Interdisciplinary session) New activities in any field are often precipitated by new enabling technologies. In musical acoustics applied to real-time sound synthesis, one exciting new development is smart-phones and tablets having high audio quality, multicore processing power, and display screens with multitouch controls. For example, it is possible to implement a complete virtual-acoustic guitar on current smart-phones and tablets, playable in real time, with plenty of processing power left over for real-time display of chord charts and vibrating-string graphics. (See presentations of the moForte Guitar at this conference and/or on the Web.) A second enabling technology area is evolving high-level domain-specific languages for audio signal processing such as Functional AUdio STream (FAUST). For example, the source code for the moForte virtual acoustic guitar, written in the FAUST language, is about an order of magnitude smaller (and faster to write) than conventional C + +, while the compiled performance is generally within a factor of 2. A third enabling technology area is advancement in methods for convex optimization along with advances in the development of convex formulations of important problems. For example, a convex formulation has recently been developed for approximating 2D bowed-string bridge admittances as ”passive” (positive-real) digital filters. (See presentations by Esteban Maestre.)