Toward Next-Generation Digital Keyboard Instruments

In this article, alternative approaches to digital keyboard instrument synthesis are looked into. Physics-based sound synthesis, which aims at generating natural-sounding musical instrument tones algorithmically without using a large sample database, is a promising approach. It would provide high-quality music synthesis to systems that cannot afford a large memory, such as mobile phones and portable electronic games. The realistic parametric synthesis of musical instrument sounds is still a challenge, but physical modeling techniques introduced during the last few decades can help to solve it. Recently, the first commercial products have been introduced, for example, by Pianoteq. Three keyboard instruments, the clavichord, the harpsichord, and the grand piano, are focused on here. The sound production principles and acoustics of these instruments are first discussed. Then, the previous parametric synthesis algorithms developed for these instruments are reviewed. The remaining part of this article concentrates on new signal processing methods for parametric synthesis of the piano