Download Large-scale Real-time Modular Physical Modeling Sound Synthesis Due to recent increases in computational power, physical modeling synthesis is now possible in real time even for relatively complex models. We present here a modular physical modeling instrument design, intended as a construction framework for string- and bar- based instruments, alongside a mechanical network allowing for arbitrary nonlinear interconnection. When multiple nonlinearities are present in a feedback setting, there are two major concerns. One is ensuring numerical stability, which can be approached using an energy-based framework. The other is coping with the computational cost associated with nonlinear solvers—standard iterative methods, such as Newton-Raphson, quickly become a computational bottleneck. Here, such iterative methods are sidestepped using an alternative energy conserving method, allowing for great reduction in computational expense or, alternatively, to real-time performance for very large-scale nonlinear physical modeling synthesis. Simulation and benchmarking results are presented.
Download Timpani Drum Synthesis in 3D on GPGPUs Physical modeling sound synthesis for systems in 3D is a computationally intensive undertaking; the number of degrees of freedom is very large, even for systems and spaces of modest physical dimensions. The recent emergence into the mainstream of highly parallel multicore hardware, such as general purpose graphical processing units (GPGPUs) has opened an avenue of approach to synthesis for such systems in a reasonable amount of time, without severe model simplification. In this context, new programming and algorithm design considerations appear, especially the ease with which a given algorithm may be parallelized. To this end finite difference time domain methods operating over regular grids are explored, with regard to an interesting and non-trivial test problem, that of the timpani drum. The timpani is chosen here because its sounding mechanism relies on the coupling between a 2D resonator and a 3D acoustic space (an internal cavity). It is also of large physical dimensions, and thus simulation is of high computational cost. A timpani model is presented, followed by a brief presentation of finite difference time domain methods, followed by a discussion of parallelization on GPGPU, and simulation results.