A History of Enabling Ideas Leading to Virtual Musical Instruments

This appendix summarizes some milestones toward the development of virtual musical instruments. Beginning with early musical acoustics, key developments in the literature deemed most enabling for virtual acoustic instruments are traced up to the mid 1980s, with an emphasis on string models (as in the text overall). Selected follow-on efforts are mentioned. A condensed version of this appendix was published in [457], with associated presentation overheads [459].

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Subsections

• Early Musical Acoustics
• Modal Expansions
• Mass-Spring Resonators
• Sampling Theory
• Physical Digital Filters
  • Analog Computers
  • Finite Difference Methods
  • Transfer Function Models
  • Wave Digital Filter Models
  
  
• Voice Synthesis
  • Dudley's Vocoder
  • Vocal Tract Analog Models
  • Singing Kelly-Lochbaum Vocal Tract
  • Linear Predictive Coding of Speech
  • Formant Synthesis Models
  • Further Reading in Speech Synthesis
  
  
• String Models
• Karplus-Strong Algorithms
• Digital Waveguide Models
• Summary

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written by 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.