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Real-Time Additive Synthesis with One Million Sinusoids Using a GPU

Additive synthesis is one of the fundamental sound synthesis techniques. It is based on the principle that each sound can be represented as a superposition of sine waves of different frequencies. That task can be done fully parallel and thus it is suitable for GPU (graphics processing unit) implementation. In this study we show that it is possible to compute over one million unique sine waves in real-time using a current GPU. That performance depends on the applied buffer sizes, but close to the maximum result is reachable already with a buffer of 500 samples.

Authors: Savioja, Lauri; Välimäki, Vesa; Smith III, Julius O.
Affiliations: Aalto University School of Science and Technology, Espoo, Finland; CCRMA, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, USA; NVIDIA Research, Helsinki, Finland(See document for exact affiliation information.)
AES Convention:128 (May 2010) Paper Number:7962 Import into BibTeX
Subject:High Performance Audio Processing

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