Efficient nonlinear modal sound synthesis

"Mercredis de STMS" is pleased to announce a seminar by Michele Ducceschi, invited by the STMS Lab's S3AM team.
The work of Michele Ducceschi and his team focuses on physical modelling for music acoustics and sound synthesis and, in particular, digital restoration of historical musical instruments (ERC starting Grant NEMUS: https://site.unibo.it/nemus-numerical-sound-restoration/en).

Abstract:

Modal methods are a long-established approach to physical modeling sound synthesis. Projecting the equation of motion of a linear, time-invariant system onto a basis of eigenfunctions yields a set of independent forced, lossy oscillators, which may be simulated efficiently and accurately using standard time-stepping methods. Extensions of modal techniques to nonlinear problems are possible, though often requiring the solution of densely coupled nonlinear time-dependent equations. In this talk, I will show an application of recent results in numerical simulation design, in which the nonlinear energy is first quadratised via a convenient auxiliary variable. The resulting equations may be updated in time explicitly, thus avoiding the need for expensive iterative solvers, dense linear system solutions, or matrix inversions. The case of a network of interconnected distributed elements is detailed, along with a real-time implementation as an audio plugin.