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


PhD Thesis Defence


"Evaluation of Wavetable Generation Methods for Musical Instrument
Matching"

By

Mr. Cheuk Wai Wun


Abstract

Musical instrument matching is a classic problem in digital sound
synthesis. The goal of instrument matching is to find the best set of
parameters to synthesize an acoustic instrument tone. Multiple wavetable
synthesis reproduces an instrument tone by adding several enveloped static
waveforms stored in wavetables. One successful approach to deciding the
basis spectra (i.e., the spectra of the wavetables) involves selecting
snapshots of the original spectrum. Sophisticated selection strategies
such as a genetic algorithm (GA) are required to find excellent solutions.
An alternative to spectral snapshot selection is to generate the basis
spectra, which has received little attention. This thesis describes
several artificial basis spectra generation methods based on numerical and
statistical techniques. The matching results for a range of instruments
show that a local search method slightly outperforms GA selection, and is
more efficient and easier to program; and that a weighted PCA and other
iterative methods, which are significantly faster, can find matches
comparable to near-optimal non-iterative matches. Our results also suggest
some important characteristics of the wavetable search space. The new
methods constitute a practical set that meets different specifications for
synthesizers, and can be extended to multi-note wavetable matching.


Date:			Friday, 28 January 2005

Time:			3:00p.m.-5:00p.m.

Venue:			Room 4333
			Lift 3

Chairman:		Prof. Chuan Yang Hwang (FINA)

Committee Members:	Prof. Andrew Horner (Supervisor)
			Prof. Lydia Ayers
                        Prof. Mounir Hamdi
                        Prof. Chi Ying Tsui (ELEC)
                        Prof. Christopher Keyes (Music & Fine Arts, HKBU)



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