Physical models and musical controllers: designing a novel electronic percussion instrument

A novel electronic percussion synthesizer prototype is presented. Our ambition is to design an instrument that will produce a high quality, realistic sound based on a physical modelling sound synthesis algorithm. This is achieved using a real-time Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) implementation of the model coupled to an interface that aims to make efficient use of all the subtle nuanced gestures of the instrumentalist. It is based on a complex physical model of the vibrating plate - the source of sound in the majority of percussion instruments. A Xilinx Virtex II pro FPGA core handles the sound synthesis computations with an 8 billion operations per second performance and has been designed in such a way to allow a high level of control and flexibility. Strategies are also presented to that allow the parametric space of the model to be mapped to the playing gestures of the percussionist.