But How Does It Sound?

The challenge of physical modeling, however, is that the model must really sound like the instrument or effect it is imitating. In some cases, particularly with wind instruments, this can be difficult to achieve. Thus, while noise need never be a problem, it can be difficult to generate exactly the right timbre throughout the control space. For this reason, many expressive sound synthesizers employ both modeling structure and measured data. One name for this is structured sampling (discussed further below).

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About the Author: Julius Orion Smith III
Julius Smith's background is in electrical engineering (BS Rice 1975, PhD Stanford 1983). He is presently Professor of Music and Associate Professor (by courtesy) of Electrical Engineering at Stanford's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), teaching courses and pursuing research related to signal processing applied to music and audio systems. See http://ccrma.stanford.edu/~jos/ for details.