Simulation of the violin section sound based on the analysis of orchestra performance

A study on simulating a string instrument section of a symphony orchestra is presented. An anechoic recording of a single violin is used as the actual instrument sound, and the section sound is created by introducing temporal differences to the violin recording with a phase vocoder in the time-frequency domain. In addition, amplitude modulation and pitch shift are applied to the duplicated signals. The applied temporal differences follow a distribution that is obtained from a real violin section, recorded with contact microphones and analyzed with onset detection. Results of a listening test show that the proposed method provides a better simulation of a large instrument section than the traditional chorus effect.