Papers for

audio plugin designers

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Guitar synthesis improved with editable note and string control

Expressive Guitar Synthesis via Controllable Latent Flow Matching

Abstract: Realistic guitar synthesis requires both audio fidelity and interpretable control over how notes are performed. The input timed MIDI events decide what is played but not how, leaving the continuous within-note decisions of guitar performance--such as pitch inflection and per-string articulation--unspecified. A model that directly maps MIDI to audio must therefore realize the performance implicitly, and users are left with limited control over the synthesized performance. We therefore propose a two-stage guitar synthesis pipeline that predicts editable, per-string $f_0$ and amplitude trajectories from timed note events and note-level dynamics, and renders them into audio using latent flow matching. Experimental results show that the proposed system outperforms a matched single-stage counterpart and DDSP-Guitar in control fidelity and perceived quality, while keeping the controls editable. Sound examples can be found online.

Tue 27 OctSound
The gist
Creating realistic guitar sounds with computers is hard because simply knowing what notes to play doesn’t say how to play them expressively. The authors propose a two-part system where the first part predicts how each guitar string's pitch and loudness should change over time based on the note instructions, and the second part turns these predictions into actual guitar sounds. This approach allows users to edit the details of the guitar performance, like string articulations, which was difficult before. Their experiments show that this method produces better-quality guitar sounds and offers more control than previous single-step methods.
Open → 2610.36786v1