Download A Digital Model of the Buchla Lowpass-Gate In recent years there has been an increasing amount of interest in the style of synthesis implemented by Don Buchla in his instrument designs from the early 1960s until the present. A key part of the Buchla synthesizer and its characteristic quality is the ’lowpass gate’ filter and the acoustic-like plucked sounds that it provides. In this work we examine the circuit of the low-pass gate, both its audio and control portions. We propose a number of digital models of these circuits, as well as a model of the photoresistive optoisolator or ’vactrol’ used within them. In the case of the audio path of the device, we pay particular attention to maintaining desirable behavior under time-variation of its parameters. The resulting digital model retains much of the interesting character of the analog system, and is computationally cheap enough to use within a standard computer-music setup.
Download Efficient signal extrapolation by granulation and convolution with velvet noise Several methods are available nowadays to artificially extend the duration of a signal for audio restoration or creative music production purposes. The most common approaches include overlap-andadd (OLA) techniques, FFT-based methods, and linear predictive coding (LPC). In this work we describe a novel OLA algorithm based on convolution with velvet noise, in order to exploit its sparsity and spectrum flatness. The proposed method suppresses spectral coloration and achieves remarkable computational efficiency. Its issues are addressed and some design choices are explored. Experimental results are proposed and compared to a well-known FFT-based method.
Download Fast Approximation of the Lambert W Function for Virtual Analog Modelling When modelling circuits one has often to deal with equations containing both a linear and an exponential part. If only a single exponential term is present or predominant, exact or approximate closed-form solutions can be found in terms of the Lambert W function. In this paper, we propose reformulating such expressions in terms of the Wright Omega function when specific conditions are met that are customary in practical cases of interest. This eliminates the need to compute an exponential term at audio rate. Moreover, we propose simple and real-time suitable approximations of the Omega function. We apply our approach to a static and a dynamic nonlinear system, obtaining digital models that have high accuracy, low computational cost, and are stable in all conditions, making the proposed method suitable for virtual analog modelling of circuits containing semiconductor devices.
Download Analysis and Emulation of Early Digitally-Controlled Oscillators Based on the Walsh-Hadamard Transform Early analog synthesizer designs are very popular nowadays, and the discrete-time emulation of voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) circuits is covered by a large number of virtual analog (VA) textbooks, papers and tutorials. One of the issues of well-known VCOs is their tuning instability and sensitivity to environmental conditions. For this reason, digitally-controlled oscillators were later introduced to provide stable tuning. Up to now, such designs have gained much less attention in the music processing literature. In this paper, we examine one of such designs, which is based on the Walsh-Hadamard transform. The concept was employed in the ARP Pro Soloist and in the Welson Syntex, among others. Some historical background is provided, along with a discussion on the principle, the actual implementation and a band-limited virtual analog derivation.
Download Arbitrary-Order IIR Antiderivative Antialiasing Nonlinear digital circuits and waveshaping are active areas of study,
specifically for what concerns numerical and aliasing issues. In
the past, an effective method was proposed to discretize nonlinear
static functions with reduced aliasing based on the antiderivative of
the nonlinear function. Such a method is based on the continuoustime convolution with an FIR antialiasing filter kernel, such as a
rectangular kernel. These kernels, however, are far from optimal
for the reduction of aliasing. In this paper we introduce the use
of arbitrary IIR rational transfer functions that allow a closer approximation of the ideal antialiasing filter, required in the fictitious continuous-time domain before sampling the nonlinear function output. These allow a higher degree of aliasing reduction and
can be flexibly adjusted to balance performance and computational
cost.
Download Optimal Integer Order Approximation of Fractional Order Filters Fractional order filters have been studied since a long time,
along with their applications to many areas of physics and engineering. In particular, several solutions have been proposed in
order to approximate their frequency response with that of an ordinary filter. In this paper, we tackle this problem with a new approach: we solve analytically a simplified version of the problem
and we find the optimal placement of poles and zeros, giving a
mathematical proof and an error estimate. This solution shows improved performance compared to the current state of the art and is
suitable for real-time parametric control.
Download Antiderivative Antialiasing with Frequency Compensation for Stateful Systems Employing nonlinear functions in audio DSP algorithms requires attention as they generally introduce aliasing. Among others, antiderivative antialiasing proved to be an effective method for static nonlinearities and gave rise to a number of variants, including our AA-IIR method. In this paper we introduce an improvement to AA-IIR that makes it suitable for use in stateful systems. Indeed, employing standard antiderivative antialiasing techniques in such systems alters their frequency response and may cause stability issues. Our method consists in cascading a digital filter after the AA-IIR block in order to fully compensate for unwanted delay and frequency-dependent effects. We study the conditions for such a digital filter to be stable itself and evaluate the method by applying it to the diode clipper circuit.
Download A General Antialiasing Method for Sine Hard Sync Hard sync is a feature appearing in many analog synthesizers: it consists in retriggering a slave oscillator, regardless of its phase, every time a master oscillator completes its cycle. If this process is naïvely implemented digitally, it is subject to aliasing. While for sawtooth, square, and triangle waves several effective antialiasing methods have been developed, the literature is sparser concerning sine hard sync, arguably because discontinuities of infinite order are introduced which are more difficult to handle. In this paper, we introduce a new antialiasing algorithm for sine hard sync which is obtained by filtering the hard-synced sine with a FIR lowpass kernel, as opposed to existing methods based on the windowed sinc function. We show that our method yields lower computational cost and better aliasing reduction.
Download A Quadric Surface Model of Vacuum Tubes for Virtual Analog Applications Despite the prevalence of modern audio technology, vacuum tube amplifiers continue to play a vital role in the music industry. For this reason, over the years, many different digital techniques have been introduced for accomplishing their emulation. In this paper, we propose a novel quadric surface model for tube simulations able to overcome the Cardarilli model in terms of efficiency whilst retaining comparable accuracy when grid current is negligible. After showing the model capability to well outline tubes starting from measurement data, we perform an efficiency comparison by implementing the considered tube models as nonlinear 3-port elements in the Wave Digital domain. We do this by taking into account the typical common-cathode gain stage employed in vacuum tube guitar amplifiers. The proposed model turns out to be characterized by a speedup of 4.6× with respect to the Cardarilli model, proving thus to be promising for real-time Virtual Analog applications.