Sound models for synthesis: a structural viewpoint

For the needs of music production and multimedia art, sound synthesis algorithms are needed which are versatile, responsive to user’s expectations, and having high audio quality. It is useful to organize our intuitive sound abstracts into models. A computational model can be used for representing and generating a whole class of sounds, depending on the internal structure of the model and on the choice of control parameters. We will review some of the most important computational models that are being used for sound synthesis in musical production from the viewpoint of the model structure. Moreover, the Centro di Sonologia Computazionale of Padova University has done research on synthesis models for a long time and the main achievements in both the scientific and musical fields will be presented.