Physical Models and Musical Controllers -- Designing a Novel Electronic Percussion Instrument

Katarzyna Chuchacz, Sile O'Modhrain, and Roger Woods

Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression

Abstract:

A novel electronic percussion synthesizer prototype is presented. Our ambition is to design an instrument that will produce a high quality, realistic sound based on a physical modelling sound synthesis algorithm. This is achieved using a real-time Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) implementation of the model coupled to an interface that aims to make efficient use of all the subtle nuanced gestures of the instrumentalist. It is based on a complex physical model of the vibrating plate --- the source of sound in the majority of percussion instruments. A Xilinx Virtex II pro FPGA core handles the sound synthesis computations with an 8 billion operations per second performance and has been designed in such a way to allow a high level of control and flexibility. Strategies are also presented to that allow the parametric space of the model to be mapped to the playing gestures of the percussionist.

Citation:

Katarzyna Chuchacz, Sile O'Modhrain, and Roger Woods. 2007. Physical Models and Musical Controllers -- Designing a Novel Electronic Percussion Instrument. Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.1177071

BibTeX Entry:

  @inproceedings{Chuchacz2007,
 abstract = {A novel electronic percussion synthesizer prototype is presented. Our ambition is to design an instrument that will produce a high quality, realistic sound based on a physical modelling sound synthesis algorithm. This is achieved using a real-time Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) implementation of the model coupled to an interface that aims to make efficient use of all the subtle nuanced gestures of the instrumentalist. It is based on a complex physical model of the vibrating plate --- the source of sound in the majority of percussion instruments. A Xilinx Virtex II pro FPGA core handles the sound synthesis computations with an 8 billion operations per second performance and has been designed in such a way to allow a high level of control and flexibility. Strategies are also presented to that allow the parametric space of the model to be mapped to the playing gestures of the percussionist.},
 address = {New York City, NY, United States},
 author = {Chuchacz, Katarzyna and O'Modhrain, Sile and Woods, Roger},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression},
 doi = {10.5281/zenodo.1177071},
 issn = {2220-4806},
 keywords = {Physical Model, Electronic Percussion Instrument, FPGA. },
 pages = {37--40},
 title = {Physical Models and Musical Controllers -- Designing a Novel Electronic Percussion Instrument},
 url = {http://www.nime.org/proceedings/2007/nime2007_037.pdf},
 year = {2007}
}