EXTRACTION OF PHYSICAL AND EXPRESSIVE PARAMETERS FOR MODEL-BASED SOUND SYNTHESIS OF THE CLASSICAL GUITAR Cumhur Erkut 1 , Vesa Välimäki 1 , Matti Karjalainen 1 , and Mikael Laurson 2 1 Helsinki University of Technology Laboratory of Acoustics and Audio Signal Processing Espoo, Finland 2 Sibelius Academy, Centre for Music Technology, Helsinki, Finland Cumhur.Erkut@hut.fi, Vesa.Valimaki@hut.fi Matti.Karjalainen@hut.fi, laurson@amadeus.siba.fi http://www.acoustics.hut.fi Abstract The calibration of model parameters is a crucial subproblem for realistic model-based sound synthesis. This paper describes the revision of the calibration process of a classi- cal guitar model, and extends the parameter extraction procedure to capture information about performance characteristics, such as the damping regimes, repeated plucks, vibrato characteristics, different pluck styles and dynamic variations. 0 Introduction Model-based sound synthesis of musical instruments has been an augmenting research field in the 1990’s. String instrument models, in particular, have provided a theoretical framework for formulation of various model-based approaches. Throughout the years, some of these ap- proaches have gained more popularity than the others, mainly because of their computational efficiency for real-time sound synthesis purposes and because of their good sound quality. The path towards today’s most powerful and realistic synthesis models emerged from the extensions by Jaffe and Smith [1] to the simple, yet efficient Karplus-Strong algorithm [2]. The extensions emphasized the physics underlying the algorithm, and favored a modular, DSP-based formula- tion. Later, Smith generalized these ideas to devise the theory of digital waveguide modeling [3, 4], which is the basis of the most popular model-based sound synthesis algorithms today. An important problem in model-based sound synthesis is the calibration of the parameter values of the algorithms. The algorithms themselves define the type of sound generation mech- anism, but the individual character of a specific musical instrument, such as a classical acoustic 1 © Audio Engineering Society, Inc., 2000