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Wavetable Matching of Pitched Inharmonic Instrument Tones

Wavetable matching is the process of finding the parameters needed to resynthesize a musical instrument tone using wavetable synthesis. The most important parameters are the wavetable basis spectra. Previous wavetable matching has often assumed the original tone was harmonic or nearly harmonic. This assumption does not hold for instruments such as the plucked strings. A semiautomated process has recently been proposed to group the partials based on their normalized frequency deviations, and then match each group. However, the user must adjust the group size manually to find the best match. The method is also inefficient at matching harmonic instruments. A new method for hierarchically grouping partials with similar normalized frequency deviations is introduced. Ordinary wavetable matching then finds the basis spectra for individual groups. The new method is fully automatic and requires no prior knowledge about the inharmonicity of the tone. Results for 18 instrument tones show that the new method slightly improves the perceived match on harmonic tones and greatly improves the perceived match on pitched inharmonic tones.

Authors: So, Clifford; Horner, Andrew B.
Affiliation: Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Kowloon, Hong Kong
JAES Volume 52 Issue 5 pp. 516-529; May 2004 Import into BibTeX

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