A model for real-time sound synthesis of guitar on a floating-point signal processor

Algorithms that can be used to synthesize guitar sounds on a floating-point signal processor are presented. A finite impulse response (FIR) Lagrange interpolator is introduced to implement the efficient and precise fractional delay approximation that is needed to achieve arbitrary and varying-length strings. This kind of interpolation is especially good in avoiding distortion and undesirable extra effects when the string length is changing continuously during the synthesis of a sound. The interpolator can also be used in other cases, e.g. in transmission-line modeling of acoustic tube resonators in wind instruments and for vocal tract models in speech synthesis. In addition to the interpolation principle, the implementation of the guitar string model on the TMS320C30 floating-point signal processor is described