Table of Contents

Free Reed Modeling and Sound Synthesis

Participants: Ninad Puranik and Gary Scavone

Period: 2021 - ongoing


Summary

The harmonium, ubiquitous to Hindustani music, is also amongst its most controversial instruments. Being a free-reed instrument that uses a standard western keyboard interface, it can only produce 12 discrete notes per octave. It is thus incapable of rendering the microtonality and continuous pitch ornamentations essential to Hindustani music. Yet, due to various musical and socio-political reasons, it went on to become a mainstay of Indian music.

Two of the main reasons in making the harmonium an acceptable compromise for vocal accompaniment in Hindustani music were its favorable timbral blend with the voice, and the specialized performance techniques developed by expert harmonium players which mitigated its perceived deficiencies to some extent.

The aim of this project is to develop a digital harmonium that will extend the capabilities of an acoustic harmonium for performing Hindustani music and other types of music.

The research goals of the project are:

  1. To study the acoustic behavior of the harmonium and related free reed instruments and develop physics-based simulation models for their sound synthesis.
  2. To build a virtual acoustic harmonium capable of producing realistic harmonium sounds using a real-time capable physics-based model and a MIDI keyboard controller.
  3. To create a customized keyboard interface that captures all the subtleties in the performance gestures of expert Hindustani harmonium players, enabling them to harness the additional affordances of the synthesis model to perform pitch ornamentations, in a musically meaningful manner, and with minimal additional training.

Publications