The BRASS Project, from Physical Models to Virtual Musical Instruments: Playability Issues

Abstract

Abstract. The Brass project aims to deliver software virtual musical instruments (trumpet, trombone, tenor saxophone) based on physical modelling. This requires to work on some aspects of the playability of the models so that they can be played in real time through a simple keyboard : better control of the attacks, automatic tuning, humanization.

Brass player’s mask parameters obtained by inverse method

“…Concerning brass instruments, the body of literature is more reduced, although many articles deserve to be cited and will serve as reference for the present work (see [11] for a table summarizing known values). Most notably, [12] who was one of the first to give a complete set of parameters, [13] who built an asymptotic state observer, [14] who used simulated annealing with a cost function depending on playing frequency only, [3] with data coming from high speed camera and [15] using bifurcation diagrams.…”

“…The present article aims to provide a new method to identify embouchure parameters that can be used with very little apparatus on actual musicians, and that can follow their evolution while playing. It introduces a new cost function which is a combination of [14] (for the frequency part) and [8] (without the displacement), together with some penalization (see Sect. 2.4).…”

An Environment for Physical Modeling of Articulated Brass Instruments

“…In all cases, the basic breakdown of the model into source and resonator components follows the canonical description given by McIntyre et al (1983). Extensions to the case of nonlinear wave propagation leading to shock formation and increased timbral brightness at high amplitudes have been incorporated into work on the BRASS project (Vergez and Tisserand 2006).…”