The trick about modeling acoustic instruments is that the unique sounds come from the interaction of different components. Here’s a walkthrough I shot, exploring some of my favorite sounds and showing off the interface. And that includes a version 2 offering that tames some of the things that have made physical modeling less accessible to audiences.īefore we go into that, it’s easier to show you the instrument in a video.
Applied acoustics chromaphone manual plus#
(Among commercial tools, I believe that’s true.) And you’re even more likely to know AAS from their contributions to Ableton Live – Tension, Collision, and Corpus, plus the virtual analog synth named Analog.īut whereas Sculpture and the Ableton offerings have gone untouched, Chromaphone is an instrument that has continued to evolve. The company offered Tassman, which it claims was the first physical modeling virtual instrument. And apart from Apple’s Sculpture, those from AAS are probably the most widely used (apart from basic Karplus-Strong implementations here and there). There actually aren’t all that many complete physical modeling instruments out on the market. And that’s just for simulating “real” sounds you can also bend these models to create hybrid instruments and new timbres that don’t exist in the real world.
Physical modeled instruments fit into just a few megabytes of space. You can do that with sampled instruments, of course, but that can mean piling on gigs and gigs of storage-sucking recordings to capture every nuance. Applied Acoustics Systems (AAS) of Montreal has been one of the leaders in that field – and they’ve got a new product out that might be the friendliest offering in this field yet.īy modeling the physical world, instruments based on these techniques can fool the ear into thinking they were recorded from actual acoustic instruments. This collection of techniques simulates the way sound is produced by acoustic objects. If it feels at times like everything has been done in sound synthesis, every new sound uncovered, then look to physical modeling for a way forward.