Multichannel excitation/filter modeling of percussive sounds with application to the piano

Discusses models for sounds of percussive musical instruments such as vibraphones, pianos, and the like. In addition to classical source/filter models, a “multichannel excitation/filter model” is proposed in which a single excitation is used to generate several sounds, for example, five piano tones belonging to the same octave. Techniques for estimating the model parameters are presented along with their application to the sound of a real piano. The experiments demonstrate that it is possible to calculate a single excitation signal that, when fed into different filters, generates very accurate synthetic tones. Finally, a low-cost synthesis method that can be used to generate very natural sounding percussive tones is also proposed