Modeling Chinese musical instruments

Abstract

Chinese instruments include a range of colorful instruments with distinctive characters. For example, the dizi is the most common Chinese flute, and it has a bright buzzing quality produced by a rice paper membrane glued over a hole. This paper describes models for more than 20 Chinese traditional and folk instruments using group additive synthesis with genetic algorithm-optimized parameters. Other types of Chinese flutes modeled include the xiao (vertical flute), paixiao (panpipes), and xun (ocarina). The sheng is a mouth organ with a ring of bamboo pipes attached to a wind chamber, and dates back to 1500 BC. A folk version of the sheng, called the lusheng, has also been modeled, as well as the bawu and hulusi, folk instruments that sound similar to the clarinet. The player’s mouth completely covers the bawu’s blowhole, which has a vibrating reed cut into a copper strip covering the hole. The hulusi has a playing tube and multiple drone tubes. Several pitched percussion and plucked string instruments have also been modeled. The presentation will show the acoustic instruments, their sound, their spectra, and resynthesized excerpts of music written for these instruments.