Sitar Synthesis Using Spectral Modelling Techniques

Abstract

The advent of computer music gave rise to the need of digital synthesis of musical instruments. The sitar is an Indian instrument which has desirable properties which make building a simplistic model for production of realistic sitar sounds possible. In this work, a model is built for synthesizing a plucked sitar note using spectral modelling techniques. It is also shown that this method of synthesis may be used to produce sounds due to playing dynamics as well. To this effect, extensions are proposed to our synthesis equations to model vibrato and bending. The simplicity of our model makes it computationally more efficient than other models in literature for synthesizing a plucked sitar note along with some basic playing dynamics.