Synthesis of bowing controls applied to violin sound generation
Esteban Maestre · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2011
Within instrumental sound synthesis, one of the most challenging aspects of automatic performance resides on the ability to faithfully reproduce the expressive nuances naturally conveyed by a musician when controlling a musical instrument. To that regard, much research effort has been devoted in the seek for obtaining natural-sounding synthetic performances from an annotated input score. Despite continuous improvements on sound synthesis techniques, appropriately mapping score annotations to synthesize controls still remains an interesting research problem, especially for excitation-continuous musical instruments. Along these lines, it is presented here our recent work on modeling bowing control in violin performance and its application to sound synthesis. Nearly, non-intrusive sensing techniques allow for accurate acquisition of relevant timber-related bowing control parameter signals. The temporal contours of bow velocity, bow pressing force, and bow-bridge distance are modeled as sequences of short Bzier cubic curve segments. A database of parametric representations of real performance data is used to construct a generative model able to synthesize bowing controls from an annotated score. Synthetic bowing controls are used to generate realistic performances using a digital waveguide physical model, and a spectral-domain sample-based synthesizer. Obtained results demonstrate the potential of explicitly modeling instrumental control for expressive sound synthesis.