By Tom Hays
Listen to the saxophone preset on Yamaha's VL1 synthesizer; your mind will register "saxophone." This is impressive: wind instruments are hard to simulate. As a sax goes from note to note and varies in volume, its sound changes in a cumulative, chaotic fashion that's impossible to reproduce using standard sampling or synthesis techniques. Yamaha, using some fast modern processors and a couple of great shortcuts developed at Stanford University, has developed technology dubbed "Virtual Acoustics Synthesis." With the VL1, you can play a clarinet without cutting any reeds, or blow on a 100-foot resonating tube using the lungs of Hydra – all in silicon.
The VL1 contains an assortment of virtual mouthpieces, bows, strings, and resonators, from which it assembles various wind and string instruments, both real and imagined. Its violin family has a bit of the characteristically cold Yamaha sound, but the wind instruments are absolutely phenomenal. Did you ever blow a clarinet so softly that all you heard was a slightly resonant wind? You can do that with this instrument. You want the horrible bleating of a beginning bugle player? You got it.
The computational secret behind the VL1 is the Digital Waveguide Filter, developed at Stanford's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. (See "Wave of the Future" Wired 2.03, page 50) The Waveguide Filter guides the waves passing through a simulated instrument in the same way that the physical body of an acoustic instrument guides real soundwaves.
At US$4,995, the VL1 is targeted at professional musicians with fat wallets and the willingness to climb a bit of a learning curve. It will probably increase unemployment among professional wind players and decrease the quality of clarinet parts in movie soundtracks, as keyboardists who just don't get the hang of the ol' licorice stick try to fill in and save a few bucks on studio musicians. No scoffing: both of these things happen every time music synthesizers improve this dramatically. What's next, robo magazine writers? Press Shift-F7 to insert stock technophobic tirade in closing paragraph.... Yamaha Corporation: (800) 932 0001.
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