Esteban Maestre: Synthesis of bowing controls applied to violin sound generation

Abstract

Within instrumental sound synthesis, one of the most challenging aspects of automatic performance resides on the ability to faithfully reproduce the expressive nuances naturally conveyed by a musician when controlling a musical instrument. To that regard, much research effort has been devoted in the seek for obtaining natural-sounding synthetic performances from an annotated input score. Despite continuous improvements on sound synthesis techniques, appropriately mapping score annotations to synthesizer controls still remains an interesting research problem, especially for excitation-continuous musical instruments. Along these lines, it is presented here our recent work on modeling bowing control in violin performance, and its application to sound synthesis. Nearly non-intrusive sensing techniques allow for accurate acquisition of relevant timbre-related bowing control parameter signals. The temporal contours of bow velocity, bow pressing force, and bow-bridge distance are modeled as sequences of short Bézier cubic curve segments. A database of parametric representations of real performance data is used to construct a generative model able to synthesize bowing controls from an annotated score. Synthetic bowing controls are used to generate realistic performances using a digital waveguide physical model, and a spectral-domain concatenative synthesizer. Obtained results demonstrate the potential of explicitly modeling instrumental control for expressive sound synthesis.

Bio

Esteban Maestre was born in 1979. He received the B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in electrical engineering from Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain, in 2004, and the Ph.D. degree in computer science and digital communication from Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, in 2009. From 2001 to 2006, he was a Lecturer at Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya. During 2003 and 2004, he worked as a Junior Researcher at Philips Research Laboratories, Aachen, Germany. From 2004 to 2010, he was a Researcher (Music Technology Group) and a Lecturer (Department of Information and Communication Technologies) at Universitat Pompeu Fabra. In 2008, he was a Visiting Researcher at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, Stanford University, where he is now a Postdoctoral Research Fellow working on gesture synthesis for automatic control of bowed string physical models. Concurrently, he is also with the Music Technology Group (Universitat Pompeu Fabra) where he leads research lines on ensemble performance modeling, and mentors Ph.D. students working on EU-funded research projects. His research interests include sound analysis/synthesis, gesture control of virtual musical instruments, and performance modeling.