Participants: Ninad Puranik and Gary Scavone

Period: 2021 - ongoing

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.

• Puranik, N. and Scavone, G. (2022) "Physical modelling synthesis of a harmonium." (PDF) Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics, Fourth Vienna Talk on Music Acoustics, 11-14 September 2022, 49, 035015, https://doi.org/10.1121/2.0001679.
• Puranik, N. and Scavone, G. (2023) “Physically Inspired Signal Model for Harmonium Sound Synthesis.” (PDF) Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Digital Audio Effects, Copenhagen, Denmark, 4-7 September 2023, pp. 379-382.
• Puranik, N. and Scavone, G. (2023) “Clamped Bar Model for Free Reeds.” (PDF) Proceedings of the Forum Acusticum 2023 Convention of the European Acoustics Association, Torino, Italy, 11-15 September 2023.