Download Decomposition of steady state instrument data into excitation system and formant filter components This paper describes a method for decomposing steady-state instrument data into excitation and formant filter components. The input data, taken from several series of recordings of acoustical instruments is analyzed in the frequency domain, and for each series a model is built, which most accurately represents the data as a source-filter system. The source part is taken to be a harmonic excitation system with frequency-invariant magnitudes, and the filter part is considered to be responsible for all spectral inhomogenieties. This method has been applied to the SHARC database of steady state instrument data to create source-filter models for a large number of acoustical instruments. Subsequent use of such models can have a wide variety of applications, including wavetable and physical modeling synthesis, high quality pitch shifting, and creation of “hybrid” instrument timbres.
Download Flexible software framework for modal synthesis Modal synthesis is an important area of physical modeling whose exploration in the past has been held back by a large number of control parameters, the scarcity of generalpurpose design tools and the difficulty of obtaining the computational power required for real-time synthesis. This paper presents an overview of a flexible software framework facilitating the design and control of instruments based on modal synthesis. The framework is designed as a hierarchy of polymorphic synthesis objects, representing modal structures of various complexity. As a method of generalizing all interactions among the elements of a modal system, an abstract notion of energy is introduced, and a set of energy transfer functions is provided. Such abstraction leads to a design where the dynamics of interactions can be largely separated from the specifics of particular modal structures, yielding an easily configurable and expandable system. A real-time version of the framework has been implemented as a set of C++ classes along with an integrating shell and a GUI, and is currently being used to design and play modal instruments, as well as to survey fundamental properties of various modal algorithms.