Sound synthesis using physical modeling, emulating systems of a complexity approaching and even exceeding that of real-world acoustic musical instruments, is becoming possible, thanks to recent theoretical developments in musical acoustics and algorithm design. Severe practical difficulties remain, both at the level of the raw computational resources required, and at the level of user control. An approach to the first difficulty is through the use of large-scale parallelization, and results for a variety of physical modeling systems are presented here. Any progress with regard to the second difficulty requires, necessarily, the experience and advice of professional musicians. A basic interface to a parallelized large-scale physical modeling synthesis system is presented here, accompanied by first-hand descriptions of the working methods of five composers, each of whom generated complete multichannel pieces using the system.

Synthesis using physical modeling has a long history. As computational costs for physical modeling synthesis are often much greater than for conventional synthesis methods, most techniques currently rely on simplifying assumptions. These include digital waveguides, as well as modal synthesis methods. Although such methods are efficient, it can be difficult to approach some of the more detailed behavior of musical instruments in this way, including strongly nonlinear interactions. Mainstream time-stepping simulation methods, despite being computationally costly, allow for such detailed modeling. In this article, the results of a five-year research project, Next Generation Sound Synthesis, are presented, with regard to algorithm design for a variety of sound-producing systems, including brass and bowed-string instruments, guitars, and large-scale environments for physical modeling synthesis. In addition, 3-D wave-based modeling of large acoustic spaces is discussed, as well as the embedding of percussion instruments within such spaces for full spatialization. This article concludes with a discussion of some of the basics of such time-stepping methods, as well as their application in audio synthesis.

This article presents a synthesis environment for physical modeling of valved brass instrument sounds. Synthesis is performed using finite-difference time-domain methods that allow for flexible simulation of time-varying systems. Users have control over the instrument configuration as well as player parameters, such as mouth pressure, lip dynamics, and valve depressions, which can be varied over the duration of a gesture. This article introduces the model used in the environment, the development of code from prototyping in MATLAB and optimization in C, and the incorporation of the executable file in the Sound Loom interface of the Composers Desktop Project. Planned additions to the environment are then discussed. The environment binaries are available to download online along with example sounds and input files.