Gesture based synthesis of bowed string instruments

Synthesis of traditional music instruments has been an active research area and there exist successful implementations of instruments with low degree of control like non-sustained excitation instruments. But for instruments with sustained excitation, such as bowed strings or wind instruments, where the interaction between instrument and performer is continuous, the quality of existing models is far from realistic. In general, musical instrument synthesis techniques try to model the instrument but forget about the interaction between performer and instrument, that is musically much more relevant than the instrument itself. This interaction covers expressivity, the intentional nuances and gestures that make the performer, but also what we call naturalness, that is, non intentional gestures made by the performer due to the physical constraints of the instrument, the playing technique, etc. These non-intentional gestures give a specific flavor to the sound of the performance, that make it sound natural and realistic. We can roughly classify the existing synthesis techniques into two categories: Physical models that focus on physical phenomena of sound production, and spectral models that focus on sound perception. With physical models naturalness and expressivity can hardly be reached without the need of controlling a huge amount of parameters that require the instrument itself, as well as a mastery comparable with the traditional performer and spectral models lack of performer interaction and articulation, that is, gestures. The aim of this work is to try to improve the quality in instrument sound synthesis, specifically for the violin family. We propose a hybrid model combining spectral and physical models to take advantage of the characteristics of both approaches, focusing on the gestures of the performer with the objective to provide naturalness in the synthesis.