Towards expressive instrument synthesis through smooth frame-by-frame reconstruction: From string to woodwind

We consider the task of mapping the performance of a musical excerpt on one instrument to another. Our focus is on excitation-continuous instruments, where pitch, amplitude, spectrum, and time envelope are controlled continuously by the player. The synthesized instrument should follow the target instrument's expressive gestures as much as possible, while also following its natural characteristics. We develop an objective function that balances distance of the synthesis to the target and smoothness in the spectral domain. An experiment mapping violin to bassoon playing by concatenating together short excerpts of audio from a database of solo bassoon recordings serves as an illustration.