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.

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.