Excitation modeling and synthesis for plucked guitar tones

The analysis and synthesis of plucked-guitar tones via source-filter approximations is a popular and established method for modeling the resonant behavior of the string as well as the driving excitation signal. By varying the source signal, a nearly unlimited number of unique tones can be produced using a given filter model. How-ever, it as unclear as to how exactly the model excitation signals should be parameterized in order to capture the nuances of a gui-tarist’s articulation from a recorded performance. In this paper, we apply principal components analysis to a corpus of excitation sig-nals derived from plucked-guitar recordings in order to design a codebook that captures the unique characteristics of certain string articulations. The development of an excitation codebook has sev-eral applications, including expressive synthesis of guitar tones for virtual music interfaces and insight into the expressive intentions of a performer through audio analysis. Index Terms — Source-filter models, musical instrument syn-thesis, PCA 1