Synthesis of acoustic waveforms based on parametric modeling

Abstract

A method is disclosed for synthesizing acoustic waveforms, especially musical instrument sounds. The acoustic waveforms are characterized by time-varying amplitudes, frequencies and phases of sinusoidal components. These time-varying parameters, at each analysis frame, are obtained in one embodiment by short term Fourier transforms (STFT). The spectrum envelope at each frame is parameterized with an autoregressive moving average model and applied to a waveform consisting of unit amplitude sinusoids via time-domain filtering. The resulting synthetic waveform preserves the time-varying frequency and phase information and has the same relative energy distribution among different sinusoidal components as that of the original signal. Finally, a general waveform shape for the type of acoustic signal being synthesized is applied. This is particularly useful when musical instrument sounds are being synthesized, where the commonly used four piecewise-linear attack-decay-sustain-release (ADSR) envelope model can be employed.

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