FPGA-based hardware for physical modelling sound synthesis by finite difference schemes

The implementation of physical models of musical instruments by finite difference methods can be highly computationally complex. This paper investigates the use of FPGAs to accelerate these numerical methods to allow real time production of sounds for musical applications. The methodology to derive a circuit architecture that effectively exploits the types of concurrency in the algorithm for real time performance is described. An initial implementation on Xilinx XC2VP50 device allows computation to be performed for producing 1 second of plate sound sampled at 44.1 kHz on a finite difference grid of size 100times100 in 0.84 s compared to around half an hour on a P4 Centrino 1.6 GHz laptop using MATLAB