COMPARATIVE STUDY OF PHYSICAL MODELS FOR STRINGED INSTRUMENT SOUND SYNTHESIS

Resumo

Despite the growing accessibility to computational power, sound synthesis via physical mod-
elling still demands fast algorithms to allow its popularization. This work is concerned with a time-based

comparison of two hybrid modal models for sound synthesis implemented in Python. One of them ap-
proaches the modal based synthesis problem coupling the string and body in the frequency domain. The

other works in the modal domain, that is, it uses a finite difference scheme to integrate directly the modal
differential equations governing the string motion coupled to the body. Both models are called “hybrid
modal” because the string modal parameters, i.e., natural frequencies, modal shapes and damping factors,
are obtained from analytical expressions, and the body modal parameters are extracted from numerical

modal analysis. In this paper, a set of time-domain simulations including the planar and nonplanar mo-
tions of a monochord string is presented. The measurements of their execution time are obtained for

the same computational setup, programming language and simulation parameters, delivering a quantita-
tive comparison about the execution cost of these models. Furthermore, an asymptotic analysis for the

proposed algorithms is also presented for the understanding of their scalability.