Pulsetable Synthesis of Wind Instrument Tones
We revisit pulsetable synthesis, an efficient technique for generating plausible and expressive wind instrument tones. Based on the principles of pulse forming theory, this method models sound production as the periodic repetition of shaped pulses characterizing the target instruments' spectral envelope. In this approach, single-cycle waveforms, referred to as pulses, are stored in pulsetables indexed by their corresponding fundamental frequency. During synthesis, the pulses are read from these tables to form a periodic waveform, which is further shaped by time-varying low-pass filtering, amplification, and reverberation. These processes are guided by control signal contours that describe how fundamental frequency, brightness, and loudness evolve over time. Through case studies with real-world wind instrument recordings, we show how the interplay between these control signals gives rise to articulations such as attack transients, vibrato, and growl. Finally, we discuss the potential of this framework for integration into Differentiable Digital Signal Processing (DDSP) models, where neural networks could learn synthesis parameters directly from training data.