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Accelerating the formant synthesis of haegeum sounds using a general-purpose graphics processing unit

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Abstract

Sound synthesis is recently indispensable with sophisticated audio effects for mimicking rich and natural sounds of the musical instruments, and thus sound synthesis acceleration has been an urgent issue. The formant synthesis is employed to produce the various single notes of the haegeum, a representative traditional Korean bowed string instrument. In this study, the formant synthesis process using multiple pairs of digital resonators and band-pass filters is accelerated with the power of a general-purpose graphics processing unit (GPGPU). This paper compares the performance of the proposed GPGPU-based parallel approach with the CPU-based sequential approach in order to validate the effectiveness of the proposed massively parallel method. Experimental results indicate that the proposed parallel approach achieves at least 79 times speedup over the CPU-based approach by exploiting the massive parallelism inherent in the formant sound synthesis algorithm.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korean government (MEST) (No. NRF-2013R1A2A2A05004566).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Electrical, Electronic, and Computer Engineering, University of Ulsan, 93 Daehak-ro Mugeo-dong, Nam-gu, Ulsan, 680-749, South Korea

    Myeongsu Kang, Shohidul Islam, Rashedul Islam & Jong-Myon Kim

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  1. Myeongsu Kang
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  2. Shohidul Islam
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  3. Rashedul Islam
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  4. Jong-Myon Kim
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Correspondence to Jong-Myon Kim.

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Kang, M., Islam, S., Islam, R. et al. Accelerating the formant synthesis of haegeum sounds using a general-purpose graphics processing unit. Multimed Tools Appl 75, 15445–15459 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-014-2297-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-014-2297-3

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