A Modular Percussion Synthesis Environment
The construction of new virtual instruments is one long-term goal of physical modeling synthesis; a common strategy across various different physical modeling methodologies, including lumped network models, modal synthesis and scattering based methods, is to provide a canonical set of basic elements, and allow the user to build an instrument via certain specified connection rules. Such an environment may be described as modular. Percussion instruments form a good test-bed for the development of modular synthesis techniques—the basic components are bars and plates, and may be accompanied by connection elements, with a nonlinear character. Modular synthesis has been approached using all of the techniques mentioned above, but time domain finite difference schemes are an alternative, allowing many problems inherent in the above methods, including computability, large memory and precomputation requirements, and lack of extensibility to more complex systems, to be circumvented. One such network model is presented here along with the associated difference schemes, followed by a discussion of implementation details, the issues of excitation and output, and a description of various instrument configurations. The article concludes with a presentation of simulation results, generated in the Matlab prototyping language.