Physical models of sound sources: interaction models - the "PluckSynth"

This thesis report describes a virtual musical instrument capable of time domain synthesis of guitar tones of acoustic and electrical character. Apart from the problem of the generation of guitar timbres, attention is paid to the interaction between the guitar and the player. A real time implementation with a graphical user interface has been developed, using modern software synthesis technology

Player-Instrument Interaction Models for Digital Waveguide Synthesis of Guitar : Touch and Collisions

Physically inspired sound synthesis techniques have been devised for several instruments including guitar. Less well studied are methods to model the interactions of the player with strings and of the strings with other mechanical parts of the instrument. In this paper, we present methods based on simple scattering junctions to be inserted at various points along a digital waveguide simulating transversal wave propagation along a string. These junctions, which are derived using a balanced perturbation method for displacement wave variables, connect the waveguide with the external stimuli provided by the player or with objects that are part of the instrument. A model for plucking is revisited and improved. New nonlinear structures for the accurate model of collisions are developed. The proposed junctions achieve realistic synthesis of the interaction of the plucking finger or pick with the string, of the interaction of the fingers on the neck-side hand with strings, such as in the production of harmonics, and of the strings themselves with frets or fingerboard in a fretless instrument.©2009 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE. Gianpaolo Evangelista and Fredrik Eckerholm, Player-Instrument Interaction Models for Digital Waveguide Synthesis of Guitar Touch and Collisions, 2010, IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON AUDIO SPEECH AND LANGUAGE PROCESSING, (18), 4, 822-832.http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TASL.2009.203882