Opposition-based shuffled PSO with passive congregation applied to FM matching synthesis

Synthesis of musical instruments or human voice is a time consuming process which requires theoretical and experimental knowledge about the synthesis engine. Commonly, performers need to deal with synthesizer interfaces and a process of trial and error for creating musical sounds similar to a target sound. This drawback can be overcome by adjusting automatically the synthesizer parameters using optimization algorithms. In this paper a hybrid particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is proposed to solve the frequency modulation (FM) matching synthesis problem. The proposed algorithm takes advantage of a shuffle process for exchanging information between particles and applies the selective passive congregation and the opposition-based learning approaches to preserve swarm diversity. Both approaches for injecting diversity are based on simple operators, preserving the easy implementation philosophy of the particle swarm optimization. The proposed hybrid particle swarm optimization algorithm was validated for a three-nested FM synthesizer, which represents a 6-dimensional multimodal optimization problem with strong epistasis. Simulation results revealed that the proposed algorithm presented promising results in terms of quality of solutions.