Sound examples illustrating the paper:


     " A Percussive Sound Synthetizer
  Based on Physical and Perceptual Attributes"

  Mitsuko ARAMAKI, Richard KRONLAND-MARTINET, Thierry VOINIER, Sølvi YSTAD


Computer Music Journal
Vol. 30(2), Summer 2006, MIT Press.

        The sounds below have been synthetized in real time, using the MAX/MSP instrument described in the paper.


Simulation of the material contribution :
By simply filtering a white noise, sounds corresponding to impacts on various materials can be designed. Depending on the evolution speed of the time-varying filter, the sound seems either "metallic" or "muffled"
  • 1:   Strong damping ("muffled" or  "wooden" sound)
  • 2:   Weak damping ("metallic" sound)
Effect of modal contributions :
  From a mechanical point of view, modes are strongly dependant on the geometry  of the structure. From a signal point of view, modes correspond to mono-component  contributions. By simply adding one sinusoidal component to the strongly  damped noise (example 1), one can either simulate large or small sounding  woods.
  • 3:   The addition of a low frequency mono-component sounds like a large piece of impacted wood
  • 4:   The addition of a high frequency mono-component sounds like a small piece of impacted wood
Two ways of addying modal contributions :
  As discussed in the paper, modal contributions can be obtained in two  main ways. The first one consists in summing up deterministic components (sinusoidal waves) whereas the second uses narrow band-pass filtered versions of the entrance noise. As a result, the second approach leads to a better fusion between the noisy and the modal parts of the sound.
The sounds below are obtained using five modes.
  • 5:  Synthesis signal from the model using the additive approach
  • 6:  Synthesis signal from the model using the band-pass filtering approach
Some examples of impacted sounds generated by the model :
Simulation of the dynamic of the impact :
  The strength of the impact is correlated to the amount of energy given to  the sounding structure. As a consequence, the stronger the impact, the richer  the sound. These dynamical characteristics are simulated by controling a low  pass filter bandwidth by the impact force.
A crucial aspect of the mapping - the tuning :
  The pitch of complex sounds still is an open issue. As an approach, we proposed  to tune the impacted sounds by considering the modal components as a cluster  of notes. Sounds can then be tuned by associating musical chords to sounds. These chords are defined by the tonic notes, the harmonic structures (major, minor, 7th, 9th, diminished, ...) and their inversions.
Control of the material :
Morphing effects simulating continuous transitions between two materials can be obtained by interpolating the synthesis parameters.
These sound examples are currently used in neurophysiological experiments to study the categorization process of impacted materials