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.