Designing virtual instruments for computer music

Abstract

This paper is about how to create virtual musical instruments. Virtual instruments have a wide variety of usages and vary from digitizing audio samples of real instruments and recreating brand new virtual instruments that do not exist. Virtual instruments help music composers to compose music more easily and quickly, they also provide composers with new ideas and concepts for traditional music composition. The biggest attraction of virtual instruments is that the sound produced is real. Today's software synths are in some ways superior to their analog counterparts. They produce an excellent quality of sound, are stable, and parameters are automatable in real time, such as the opening and closing of filters, the changing of envelope decay times, bending pitch, and so on. Virtual instruments are a global standard and their acceptance has strengthened with time. This paper describes the concept of music synthesis and explains the process of how to create a new instrument from a pre-recorded guitar. © 2013 SERSC.