A project with Jonathan Berger and Julius Smith. I will present this work at SIGMUS summer workshop in Japan and ICMC05.
Manual adjustment of control parameters for physical modeling synthesis suffers from practical limitations of time-intensive and sometimes arbitrary and haphazard parameter tweaking. An efficient approach to automatic parameter estimation, the goal of this study, would potentially eliminate much of the hit or miss nature of parameter tuning by finding optimal control parameters for physical modeling synthesis. The method is based on psychoacoustically motivated timbre distance estimations between a recorded reference sound and a set of corresponding synthesized sounds. The timbre comparisons are based upon the sample mean and standard deviation between Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) computed using several steady-state time frames from the reference and synthesized sounds. This framework serves as a preliminary model of the auditory feedback loop in music instrument performance.
ICMC05 paper (pdf)
"Using A Perceptually Based Timbre Metric for
Parameter Control Estimation in Physical Modeling Synthesis"
SIGMUS 05 Summer Symposium (pdf)
"Using A Perceptually Based Timbre Metric for
Parameter Control Estimation in Physical Modeling Synthesis (in Japanese)"