Automatic Calibration of Modified FM Synthesis to Harmonic Sounds using Genetic Algorithms

Many audio synthesis techniques have been successful in reproducing the sounds of musical instruments. Several of these techniques require parameters calibration. However, this task can be difficult and time-consuming especially when there is not intuitive correspondence between a parameter value and the change in the produced sound. Searching the parameter space for a given synthesis technique is, therefore, a task more naturally suited to an automatic optimization scheme. Genetic algorithms (GA) have been used rather extensively for this purpose, and in particular for calibrating Classic FM (ClassicFM) synthesis to mimic recorded harmonic sounds. In this work, we use GA to further explore its modified counterpart, Modified FM (ModFM), which has not been used as widely, and its ability to produce musical sounds not as fully explored. We completely automize the calibration of a ModFM synthesis model for the reconstruction of harmonic instrument tones using GA. In this algorithm, we refine parameters and operators such as crossover probability or mutation operator for closer match. As an evaluation, we show that GA system automatically generates harmonic musical instrument sounds closely matching the target recordings, a match comparable to the application of GA to ClassicFM synthesis.