• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.20 no.1
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• pp.3-12
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• 2001

In physical modeling of plucked string instruments, the vibration of a string is typically simulated by the linear system. Currently the Digital Waveguides of J.O.Smith[1] are widely used to get a high quality sound of the plucked string instrument. He used the wave equation to derive the Digital Waveguides and emphasized the time variable. In this thesis, new model of plucked string is proposed to improve the sound quality emphasizing the spatial variable of the wave equation. In our model, we used the fixed sampling interval which is not dependent on the speed of the wave. So we could get more detailed description of wave movement by the time variable. As a result, the new model could produce a higher quality sound of plucked string instrument.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.32 no.4
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• pp.361-368
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• 2013

As one way to describe the behavior of a vibrating string, analogies to a transmission line have been made based on the fact that they have oppositely travelling waves on each of them. In such analogies, a rigid end to the string has been represented as an open circuit, and the displacement of the string as the current on the transmission line. However it turns out that the rigid end corresponds to a short circuit, the displacement to the voltage by the theory of the transmission line, and it is confirmed by experiments with circuit simulations. Based on these discoveries, a transmission line based plucked string model comprising a transmission line, two piecewise linear current sources, and switches is proposed. The proposed model is validated by showing that the voltage at the arbitrarily chosen location, and the voltage calculated over an infinitesimal portion at the end of the transmission line are consistent with the displacement at the corresponding location and the force on the rigid end of the string from the well known difference form of a wave equation governing the behavior of the string with its fundamental frequency tuned to that for the proposed model, respectively. Moreover, the applicability of the proposed model to modeling string and wind instruments is presented.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.30 no.2
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• pp.107-113
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• 2011

This paper describes a development of a loop filter design in a physical modeling of the plucked string instrument. The conventional method proposed by V$\"{a}$lim$\"{a}$ki cannot estimate right parameters if a sound has either very short sustain or no sustain. In order to overcome this drawback, we propose the use of the decay region and 5 to 20 harmonics of the sound in the estimation of loop filter parameters. The most appropriate filter coefficient is chosen by frequency signal to noise ratio. To verify the performance of the proposed method, the guitar, gayageum and geomungo were selected as the target because they have different shape, structure, and material of strings. Regardless of the duration of harmonics, the proposed method was able to estimate the loop filter parameters representing frequency-dependent damping of harmonics.

• Journal of the Institute of Convergence Signal Processing
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.102-107
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• 2006

In this paper, we propose a method of a sound synthesis of Korean plucked string instrument, gayageum, by physical modeling which use impulse responses of body and Anjok. Gayageum consists of three kinds of systems: string, body, and Anjok. These are a serial combination of linear time invariant systems. String can be modeled by digital delay line. Body and Anjok can be estimated by their impulse responses. We found three resonance frequencies in the body impulse response, and implemented resonator as body. Anjok was implemented as high pass filter in fundamental frequency band of gayageum. RMSEs of synthesized sounds are distributed from 0.01 to 0.03. It was difficult to distinguish the resulting synthesized sounds from the originals sound by ear.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.30 no.5
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• pp.281-294
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• 2011

Physics-based sound synthesis usually requires high computational costs and this results in a restriction of its use in real-time applications. This motivates us to implement the sound synthesis algorithm of plucked-string instruments using multi-core processor architectures and determine the optimal processing element (PE) configuration for the target instruments. To determine the optimal PE configuration, we evaluate the impacts of a sample-per-processing element (SPE) ratio that is defined as the amount of sample data directly mapped to each PE on system performance and both area and energy efficiencies using architectural and workload simulations. For the acoustic guitar, the highest area and energy efficiencies are achieved at a SPE ratio of 5,513 and 2,756, respectively, for the synthesis of musical sounds sampled at 44.1 kHz. In the case of the classical guitar, the maximum area and energy efficiencies are achieved at a SPE ratio of 22,050 and 5,513, respectively. In addition, the synthetic sounds were very similar to original sounds in their spectra. Furthermore, we conducted MUSHRA subjective listening test with ten subjects including nine graduate students and one professor from the University of Ulsan, and the evaluation of the synthetic sounds was excellent.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.29 no.3
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• pp.191-199
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• 2010

Physical modeling is a synthesis method of high quality sound which is similar to real sound for musical instruments. However, since physical modeling requires a lot of parameters to synthesize sound of a musical instrument, it prevents real-time processing for the musical instrument which supports a large number of sounds simultaneously. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a single instruction multiple data (SIMD) parallel processor that supports real-time processing of sound synthesis of guitar, a representative plucked string musical instrument. To control six strings of guitar, we used a SIMD parallel processor which consists of six processing elements (PEs). Each PE supports modeling of the corresponding string. The proposed SIMD processor can generate synthesized sounds of six strings simultaneously when a parallel synthesis algorithm receives excitation signals and parameters of each string as an input. Experimental results using a sampling rate 44.1 kHz and 16 bits quantization indicate that synthesis sounds using the proposed parallel processor were very similar to original sound. In addition, the proposed parallel processor outperforms commercial TI's TMS320C6416 in terms of execution time (8.9x better) and energy efficiency (39.8x better).