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Virtual violin produces realistic sounds

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Re: Virtual violin produces realistic sounds

#31

Post by infinitewars »

xphos wrote: post #23

As someone who plays the violin very poorly I don't think this sounds like violin at all. It is very folksy synthetic sounding. They are clearly plucking but it sounds similar to if you were bowing its really strange. I definitely could replicate that quality of model but I think I have heard much better models elsewhere

It was a finite element simulation of a CT-scanned violin, but as they note,

“If there’s anything that’s sounding mechanical to it, it’s because we’re using the exact same time function, or standard way of plucking, for each note,” says Makris, who is himself a lute player. “A musician will adapt the way they’re plucking, to put a little more feeling on certain notes than others. But there could be subtleties which we could incorporate and refine.”

Re: Virtual violin produces realistic sounds

#32

Post by xeonmc »

infinitewars wrote: post #31
xphos wrote: post #23

As someone who plays the violin very poorly I don't think this sounds like violin at all. It is very folksy synthetic sounding. They are clearly plucking but it sounds similar to if you were bowing its really strange. I definitely could replicate that quality of model but I think I have heard much better models elsewhere

It was a finite element simulation of a CT-scanned violin, but as they note, “If there’s anything that’s sounding mechanical to it, it’s because we’re using the exact same time function, or standard way of plucking, for each note,” says Makris, who is himself a lute player. “A musician will adapt the way they’re plucking, to put a little more feeling on certain notes than others. But there could be subtleties which w…

In addition, the resonant characteristics of the bow also contributes significantly to the sound, as it feeds directly back to the stick-slip contact that is more akin to a mode-locked laser’s nonlinear dynamics. The violin body’s resonant characteristics in comparison is more like a passive filter.

Re: Virtual violin produces realistic sounds

#33

Post by Tade0 »

> It produces sound based on the way the instrument, including its vibrating strings, physically interacts with the surrounding air.

I suppose this is the innovative part. They're not simulating just the string, but also the fluid it's immersed in, which is a computationally hard problem.

I made a vibrating string simulator in college for our Numerical Methods course and for quite a while I couldn't understand why it sounded so bad.

Turns out rounding errors in floating point operations can propagate to a point where they produce this distinct, "metallic" sound.

They're incredibly small, but if your system of differential equations is large enough, they'll become noticeable. Switching to an algorithm with better numerical stability would probably mitigate this issue, but I didn't get that far with my project.

Re: Virtual violin produces realistic sounds

#34

Post by InitialLastName »

moralestapia wrote: post #27
yummybrainz wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm assuming the intended meaning is that this was the first time the approach led to "realistic" sound?

That's also not the case. There have been some really accurate physically-modeled instruments for at least 20 years. Also, aschkually, a violin is on the "easier" end of making it sound realistic. It's one of the "tutorial" models you go through when you start learning about this (resonators + reverb get you 80% there). Much harder to do any plucking sound (guitar, piano), and much much harder to model percussions ac…

Do you know if there has been any progress on conical-bore brass? From what I recall (I did some graduate work in instrument modeling in the late 2000s) reed instruments could be modeled convincingly, but the feedback oscillator with the lip buzzing was very difficult to model.

Re: Virtual violin produces realistic sounds

#35

Post by esafak »

xphos wrote: post #23

As someone who plays the violin very poorly I don't think this sounds like violin at all. It is very folksy synthetic sounding. They are clearly plucking but it sounds similar to if you were bowing its really strange. I definitely could replicate that quality of model but I think I have heard much better models elsewhere

It sounds more like a banjo to me. Not at all like a violin.

Re: Virtual violin produces realistic sounds

#36

Post by cozzyd »

zebproj wrote: post #11

The article makes it sound like this is a very a new idea, but physical models of music instruments, including violin, has been around for over 40 years. Daisy Bell, the first piece of computer music and performed by their model, utilized a physical model of the human singing voice based on measurements of human vocal tract, and that was done in 1962. Julius Smith wrote pretty comprehensive textbook on the subject of…

I have to say JOS was possibly my favorite instructor in undergrad....

Re: Virtual violin produces realistic sounds

#38

Post by jancsika »

Tade0 wrote: post #33

> It produces sound based on the way the instrument, including its vibrating strings, physically interacts with the surrounding air. I suppose this is the innovative part. They're not simulating just the string, but also the fluid it's immersed in, which is a computationally hard problem. I made a vibrating string simulator in college for our Numerical Methods course and for quite a while I couldn't understand why it…

> Turns out rounding errors in floating point operations can propagate to a point where they produce this distinct, "metallic" sound.

Reminds me of a Karplus-Strong synthesis implementation that produced a gorgeous guitar/mandolin sound, but only for delay durations that weren't simple ratios with the given sample rate. The simple-ratio durations would end up sounding like crude, attenuated periods of noise-- metallic sounds like you'd expect from a pitch produced in a KSS demo. Everything else had some kind of subtle interpolation error that ended up shaping the noise just enough to make it sound like a million bucks.

The problem with most KSS is that the filter used will typically saturate the timbre. So rather than hearing a guitar string, you're hearing a guitar-adjacent interpolation scheme whose prominence makes you wonder just how un-guitarlike the original unfiltered sound must have been.

Re: Virtual violin produces realistic sounds

#39

Post by pierrec »

In this area of research, there's this classic trap that many fall into (including myself, many times). You focus on modeling things like the vibrating string, the resonant body, etc. to perfection. But it still sounds, uh, not great, because the more important and difficult part is modeling detailed control and the human/instrument interface. Air fluctuations around the violin sound like a fun experiment, but I don't think you'll get much additional realism from that, compared to a simple/classical impulse response model.

Even in this case, they're choosing the easy path (plucked, pizzicato), but the human/instrument interface is still audibly oversimplified while the resonant body has an unnecessary amount of "realism". The sound of pizzicato has a distinct character because the player's finger/skin slides a bit on the string as they're plucking, among other factors, which sounds like it's missing here. This can be tricky to implement because it's not necessarily a one-way impulse. The string is already vibrating and affects the finger, hence "interface".

This applies 10x more with bowed strings.

Re: Virtual violin produces realistic sounds

#40

Post by BJones12 »

zebproj wrote: post #11

The article makes it sound like this is a very a new idea, but physical models of music instruments, including violin, has been around for over 40 years. Daisy Bell, the first piece of computer music and performed by their model, utilized a physical model of the human singing voice based on measurements of human vocal tract, and that was done in 1962. Julius Smith wrote pretty comprehensive textbook on the subject of…

> physical models of music instruments... has been around for over 40 years

And in consumer products for 20+. Pianoteq [0], which is awesome, was first released in 2006.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pianoteq

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