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Comment by zebproj

7 hours ago

The article makes it sound like this is a very a new idea, but physical models of music instruments, including violin, has been around for over 40 years. Daisy Bell, the first piece of computer music and performed by their model, utilized a physical model of the human singing voice based on measurements of human vocal tract, and that was done in 1962.

Julius Smith wrote pretty comprehensive textbook on the subject of building physical models of musical instruments, available online. Here, for example, is a chapter on modeling bowed string sounds: https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~jos/pasp/Bowed_Strings.html

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zebproj

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HelloUsername  7 hours ago

> Daisy Bell, the first piece of computer music and performed by their model, utilized a physical model of the human singing voice based on measurements of human vocal tract, and that was done in 1962

From the article:

> As a demonstration, the researchers applied the computational violin to play two short excerpts: one from “Bach’s Fugue in G Minor,” and another from “Daisy Bell” — a nod to the first song that was ever produced by a computer-synthesized voice.

BJones12  2 hours ago

> physical models of music instruments... has been around for over 40 years

And in consumer products for 20+. Pianoteq [0], which is awesome, was first released in 2006.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pianoteq

  • vunderba  1 hour ago

    Pianoteq has mostly replaced my old Kontakt libraries in my DAW outside of course, miking my actual piano.

    Also Audio Modeling has been in the business of creating physically modeled virtual instruments, including the violin (under the SWAM series), for a while now as well. You can do pretty fun things like map a USB breath controller to bow pressure, etc.

    https://audiomodeling.com/products/swam-violin

jerf  2 hours ago

I recall in the late 1990s that physical synthesis was thought to possibly be the next big thing, that it might take over synthesis of musical instruments entirely from the options of wavetables and FM synth at the time. It didn't, but my point here is that is where it was, a prominent alternative that everyone in the relevant fields was aware of and many people tried to make work, not a recent invention and not just an obscure academic pursuit.