Living Without the Bunnies

I'm happy to announce the release of Artifastring 1.2, a highly optimized physical simulation of a violin for sound synthesis. http://percival-music.ca/artifastring/

This release has a few minor cleanups, but much more importantly, it has updated values for some physical constants! Matthias Demoucron, the author of the PhD thesis which describes the algorithm used in Artifastring, was kind enough to reply to my questions and provide some additional information.

Some example files are in the music/ directory; if you have no clue what kind of physical values might produce decent sounds, try looking in there. The resulting audio will not sound like a professional violinist, but it should be enough to give you a rough idea and get started.

Note, however, that those files are for a purely mechanical reproduction of actions; my actual "teaching a computer to play violin" work is not part of Artifastring itself. Due to my personal vacation plans (I only get to see my family once a year!), I've decided to submit papers to the Sound and Music Conference instead of the International Computer Music Conference. This will let me spend more time in Vancouver. :)

I should be posting updated examples for the violin playing (rather than the physical simulation code) later this week. I might even do a "screen-cast" and produce a video! If I don't post anything by Friday, then I'm probably making a video and fumbling through a bunch of unfamiliar software.