Summary, Conclusions, and Outlook

With the increase of the computational power within the last decades it became possible to produce sounds based on digital synthesis algorithms in specialized hardware synthesizers or even in desktop PCs in real-time. The development started with the computationally cheap traditional sound-based synthesis methods as described in chapter 2. They can produce interesting synthetic sounds but the expressional simulation of acoustical instruments is always limited to pre-defined parameter sets or pre-recorded sound data chosen by the sound designer. Therefore, they have been extended on the cost of a higher computational complexity to models, approximating the sound production mechanisms of musical instruments. They are called physical modeling methods and some of them have been explained in chapter 4, including the finite difference method (FDM), the digital waveguide method (DWG), and the modal synthesis (MS). They allow intuitive sound modifications and expressive simulations of musical instruments. The FDM is classified as an offline method due to its high computational complexity. To be able to realize the vibrational simulation in real-time, the MS and the DWG simulate the vibrations with simplified algorithms that loose due to the simplifications the direct access to the physical parameters of the vibrating structure. They are instead adjusted to recorded sound data or to measured vibrational characteristics.