Real-time emulation of the Clavinet, an electromechanical keyboard instrument
Leonardo Gabrieli, Vesa Välimäki, Stefan Bilbao · Edinburgh Research Explorer (University of Edinburgh) · 2010
A physical model has been developed for real-time sound synthesis of the Clavinet, an electromechanical keyboard instrument from the 20th century. The Clavinet has a peculiar excitation mechanism, relying on a tangent striking the string. The modeling paradigm chosen is waveguide synthesis and this paper suggests several novel techniques, such as a polynomial excitation pulse model and a beating generator, both of which have parameters depending on key velocity. Realistic emulation of the release part of Clavinet tones is based on a decrease in the decay rate of the tone and lengthening of a delay line, which corresponds to the physical string. A real-time implementation on Pure Data demonstrates the efficiency of proposed model.