Talking physical modelling, augmented instruments and harpsichords with the Physical Audio team.

This is Prof McPherson’s inaugural lecture at Imperial College. An excellent talk on technology in music and his journey through instrument control design.

Last week Physical Audio’s Michele Ducceschi gave a seminar at IRCAM in Paris. Here he discusses some of the theoretical background that we use in our plugins, as well as an overview of sound synthesis. There is also an outline of his new project NEMUS at the University of Bologna.

The nonlinear vibration of plates is what leads to the characteristic sounds of gongs—pitch glides, crashes and swells—that we all know. A linear model is insufficient to capture these effects, which vary strongly with the striking force.

We were invited to take part in the Audio Programmer monthly meetup for March. Here’s the full video of our panel discussion on physical modelling synthesis, discussing the latest research in the field and how we translate this into real-time plugins. Many thanks to Joshua Hodge for arranging this.

This video is the keynote talk given by Stefan at last year’s Timbre 2020 virtual conference. There’s an in-depth account of the development of physical modelling techniques for sound synthesis and it’s relation to control parameters and timbre, along with details of the models created during the NESS project.

Here’s the full video of our keynote speech at the Sound and Music Computing conference 2021. We look at some of the history of digital sound synthesis and physical modelling, as well as some of the latest research in the field. There’s also a preview of the all new Derailer and Dynamic Plate Reverb plugins. …

Here at Physical Audio we’re just preparing to launch new, updated versions of our instrument and reverb plugins. They have been rewritten in the JUCE framework to give multi-platform output. As part of the relaunch we need to test the plugins on Apple’s new hardware, the M1 processor, as found in the new Mac mini. In this post we’ll look at the performance of this processor using our Plate Reverb algorithm