Virtual Acoustic Models for Physically-Modeled Musical Instruments

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Applied Acoustics Systems is a market leader in physically-modeled software musical instruments. The most notable benefit of physically-modeled instruments is that their response to the performer's input is both realistic and musical - the physically-modeled instruments respond very much like acoustic instruments. A second major benefit is that they are parametrizable, meaning that a user can change physical properties of the instrument for convenience or musical expression. However, familiarity with real acoustic instruments in real acoustic environments makes the lack of acoustic space particularly noticeable for physical models of guitars, bowed strings, percussion, and woodwinds. In the same way that Applied Acoustics makes physical models of instruments, it would be beneficial to have physical models of the acoustic environments in which the instruments are played, heard, and recorded. This involves modeling of the effects of the room, relative position of the source and recording locations, the source directivity, and the virtual microphone configuration. The proposed project will develop a control algorithm that produces parameters for the standard components of virtual acoustic environments existing in the literature. These standard components include a virtual microphone techniques for the direct path and reflections and the image-source model for the reflection geometry. Artificial reverberation will be implemented using a Feedback Delay Network (FDN) reverberator. In the current state-of-the-art, low-level parameters of the standard components are exposed to end users which requires them to have extensive acoustic expertise to achieve good perceptual results. The objective of the proposed control algorithm is to provide an intuitive interface to musicians that requires no acoustic expertise, and to translate the controls of this interface to physically-consistent parameters such as timing, filtering, and gain for the standard components.