Real-Time Sound Synthesis of Plucked String Instruments Using a Data Parallel Architecture

Abstract

Recent advances in physics-based sound synthesis have offered huge potential possibilities for the creation of new musical instruments. Despite that research on physics-based sound synthesis is going on for almost three decades, its higher computational complexity has limited its use in real-time applications. Conventional serial computation is inadequate for handling the physics-based sound synthesis of most instruments. To yield computation time compatible with real-time performance, we introduce a parallel approach to the physics-based sound synthesis. In this paper, with a parallel processing engine we implemented the physical modeling for one of traditional Korean plucked string instruments, called Gayageum, which has 12 silk strings. Analysis and simulation results suggest that our parallel approach has the potential to support the real-time sound synthesis of the Gayageum instrument. Moreover, our parallel approach outperforms today's DSPs in terms of performance and energy efficiency.