Download Real-time Finite Difference Physical Models of Musical Instruments on a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) Real-time sound synthesis of musical instruments based on solving differential equations is of great interest in Musical Acoustics especially in terms of linking geometry features of musical instruments to sound features. A major restriction of accurate physical models is the computational effort. One could state that the calculation cost is directly linked to the geometrical and material accuracy of a physical model and so to the validity of the results. This work presents a methodology for implementing realtime models of whole instrument geometries modelled with the Finite Differences Method (FDM) on a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA), a device capable of massively parallel computations. Examples of three real-time musical instrument implementations are given, a Banjo, a Violin and a Chinese Ruan.
Download Real-time Physical Model of a Wurlitzer and Rhodes Electronic Piano Two well known examples of electro-acoustical keyboards played since the 60s to the present day are the Wurlitzer electric piano and the Rhodes piano. They are used in such diverse musical genres as Jazz, Funk, Fusion or Pop as well as in modern Electronic and Dance music. Due to the popularity of their unique sound and timbre, there exist various hardware and software emulations which are either based on a physical model or consist of a sample based method for sound generation. In this paper, a real-time physical model implementation of both instruments using field programmable gate array (FPGA) hardware is presented. The work presented herein is an extension of simplified models published before. Both implementations consist of a physical model of the main acoustic sound production parts as well as a model for the electromagnetic pickup system. Both models are compared to a series of measurements and show good accordance with their analog counterparts.