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A Comparison between Local Search and Genetic Algorithm Methods for Wavetable Matching

Picking spectral snapshots from an original tone is a successful approach to finding basis spectra in wavetable matching of musical instrument tones. Spectral snapshot selection usually requires optimization by a sophisticated technique such as a genetic algorithm (GA). GA selection is compared to a straightforward local search method, which first selects an initial set of basis spectra from the original tone by some simple selection strategy, and then modifies and improves them. Matching results for a range of instruments show that local search, when using the best composite results found by various simple selection strategies, is as effective as the GA. Moreover, surprisingly, starting from various initial basis spectra, local search can usually find several different matches, all with errors within 1% of the best solution, indicating that there are many near-optimal solutions in the wavetable search space.

Authors: Wun, Simon; Horner, Andrew
Affiliation: Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Kowloon, Hong Kong
JAES Volume 53 Issue 4 pp. 314-325; April 2005 Import into BibTeX

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