A Music Synthesizer on FPGA

Abstract

Software synthesizers have great flexibility in the connection of the basic components of many synthesis methods, and can generate any kinds of sounds of any synthesis methods. However, the performance of the current microprocessors are not still enough for generating many sounds at a time. Speedup of the computation by some simple hardwares is expected especially for real time performance. We are now developing hardware accelerators for the software synthesizers using off the shelf boards with Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). With these hardware accelerators, we can realize any kinds of combinations of different sampling rates and data width of sounds not only generating many sounds (350 sounds on a desktop computer and 110 sounds on a note computer) at a time. This performance can be achieved by fully utilizing the flexibility of FPGAs, and outperforms DSPs.