A digital waveguide-based approach for Clavinet modeling and synthesis
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RESEARCH
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A digital waveguide-based approach for Clavinet modeling and synthesis Leonardo Gabrielli1* , Vesa Välimäki2 , Henri Penttinen2 , Stefano Squartini1 and Stefan Bilbao3
Abstract The Clavinet is an electromechanical musical instrument produced in the mid-twentieth century. As is the case for other vintage instruments, it is subject to aging and requires great effort to be maintained or restored. This paper reports analyses conducted on a Hohner Clavinet D6 and proposes a computational model to faithfully reproduce the Clavinet sound in real time, from tone generation to the emulation of the electronic components. The string excitation signal model is physically inspired and represents a cheap solution in terms of both computational resources and especially memory requirements (compared, e.g., to sample playback systems). Pickups and amplifier models have been implemented which enhance the natural character of the sound with respect to previous work. A model has been implemented on a real-time software platform, Pure Data, capable of a 10-voice polyphony with low latency on an embedded device. Finally, subjective listening tests conducted using the current model are compared to previous tests showing slightly improved results. 1 Introduction In recent years, computational acoustics research has explored the emulation of vintage electronic instruments [1-3], or national folkloric instruments, such as the kantele [4], the guqin [5], or the dan tranh [6]. Vintage electromechanical instruments such as the Clavinet [7] are currently popular and sought-after by musicians. In most cases, however, these instruments are no longer in production; they age and there is a scarcity of spare parts for replacement or repair. Studying the behavior of the Clavinet from an acoustic perspective enables the use of a physical model [8] for the emulation of its sound, making possible lowcost use for musicians. The name ‘Clavinet’ refers to a family of instruments produced by Hohner between the 1960s and the 1980s, among which the most well-known model is the Clavinet D6. The minor differences between this and other models are not addressed here. Several methods for the emulation of musical instruments are now available [8-11]. Some strictly adhere to an underlying physical model and require minimal assumptions, such as finite-difference time-domain methods (FDTD) [10,12]. Modal synthesis techniques, *Correspondence: [email protected] 1 Department of Information Engineering, Università Politecnica delle Marche, Via Brecce Bianche 12, Ancona 60131, Italy Full list of author information is available at the end of the article
which enable accurate reproduction of inharmonicity and beating characteristics of each partial, have recently become popular in the modeling of stringed instruments [11,13-15]. However, the computational model proposed in this paper is based on digital waveguide (DWG) techniques, which prove to be computationally more efficient than other methods while adequate for reproducing tones of slightl
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