The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Department of Computer Science


PhD Thesis Defence

"Adaptive Wavetable Matching of Inharmonic Instrument Tones"

By

Mr. Kwok-Fung So


Abstract

Wavetable matching is the process of finding the parameters needed to
resynthesize a musical instrument tone using wavetable synthesis. The most
important parameters to find are the wavetable basis spectra. Previous
work on wavetable matching has used a genetic algorithm (GA) to select the
basis spectra. However, the work has assumed the original tone was
harmonic or nearly harmonic. This assumption is not satisfied by tones
such as from the plucked strings. In this thesis, we introduce an adaptive
wavetable matching technique for inharmonic tones. It employs a
hierarchical grouping method to group the partials with similar normalized
frequency deviations. The GA is then applied to individual groups to find
their basis spectra. It requires no prior knowledge about the
inharmonicity of the tone. We have results for 17 instrument tones of
various inharmonicity showing that the new method improves the perceived
match on inharmonic tones compared to ordinary wavetable matching with
less memory requirements than additive synthesis.


Date:			Tuesday, 11 December 2001

Time:			10:00a.m.-12:00noon

Venue:			Room 2303
			Lift 17-18

Chairman:	 	Prof. Guochang Zhang (ACCT)

Committee Members:	Dr. Andrew Horner (Supervisor)
			Dr. Lydia Ayers
			Dr. Mounir Hamdi
			Dr. Richard So (IEEM)
			Dr. Joshua Kam-Biu Chan (Music, HKU)



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