Corpus-Based Concatenative Synthesis

Corpus-based concatenative methods for musical sound synthesis have attracted much attention recently. They make use of a variety of sound snippets in a database to assemble a desired sound or phrase according to a target specification given in sound descriptors or by an example sound. With ever-larger sound databases easily available, together with a pertinent description of their contents, they are increasingly used for composition, high-level instrument synthesis, and interactive exploration of a sound corpus. This article gives an overview of the components needed for corpus-based concatenative synthesis and details of some realizations. Signal processing methods are crucial for all parts of analysis, (segmentation; and descriptor analysis), for synthesis, and can intervene in the selection part, e.g., for spectral matching