Development of a multiprocessor architecture for efficient processing allocation in electronic musical instruments

The availability of microcontrollers with medium/high performance at ever decreasing costs, enables the development of applications running on architectures composed of different processing elements suitably connected with each other. An electronic musical instrument typically includes an application processor and a set of peripheral microcontrollers that perform specific functions; the availability of increased processing power allows to distribute to these processing elements the computation bandwidth otherwise allocated entirely to the main processor. This paper presents a preliminary study on the use of this approach starting from the architecture of some electronic musical keyboards produced by KORG, a leader in the development of electronic musical instruments.