January 19, 2006.
Music 209 : Calendar : Week 1Introduction to concatenative synthesis. Details on the course project.
This year's course will concentrate on current research in concatenative sound synthesis and related topics. Concatenative synthesis methods stitch together segmented units of sound to produce the desired output. Concatenative synthesis has been successful as a method for high-quality speech synthesis and holds considerable promise for musical sound synthesis.
Diemo Schwarz popularized the term concatenative synthesis. His review paper is a good introduction to the topic. His Ph. D. thesis is a more complete description of his work in the area.
The lecture begins with a description of using concatenative synthesis for accurate piano synthesis. See this article in the magazine Sound on Sound for a good instruction to the physics of a piano. Two good articles on how to record a piano in the recording studio appear here and here.
In class, we describe one sample set for grand piano, the Black Piano, in detail. Read a review of Black Piano here and listen to mp3s of the samples from links available here (scroll down to reach mp3 links). Another grand piano software product with similar aims is reviewed here.
Concatenative piano synthesis was originally developed for hardware piano products. The Kurzweil 250, released in 1984 and described here, was the first piano product of this nature that sounded convincing. Good examples of modern hardware piano products are the Roland, Yamaha, Technics, and Casio product lines. Browse this web page for a sense of the breadth of the Yamaha product line in this area.
The lecture then discussed several products for solo violin concatenative synthesis: the Vienna Symphonic Library, Garritan Stradivari and Synful.
We listened to a Garritan version of the Paganini Capriccio, and to track that combined an acoustic cello with a Synful violin (see this discussion for more information).
We concluded the first-half of the lecture with an introduction to phrase-based synthesis, by discussing Liquid Saxophone. Demos and information of this product are available here. More information about horn synthesis is available on the course project page for horns.