Virtual Bass-Clarinet In Modalys

This article describe how the authors and the Modalysteam (IRCAM) has collaborated to develop and implement a realtime model of a complete bass-clarinet to be used in the first authors composition "Rippled Reeds" for bassclarinet and electronics, that explore the relation between an acoustic woodwind instrument and a similar virtual one. The intend was to create a model that allowed fingerings to be specified generating predictable output, in order to overcome a number of practical shortcomings when chaining complicated forked fingerings producing multiphonics. The model should run in realtime so that it could be driven from the actual acoustical playing. After a brief introduction, the first section will reflect about the choice of synthesis method and motivate its compositional use. Second section describes how a model was created from measurements of a true bass-clarinet complete with reed, mouthpiece, tube, bell and holes, sufficiently efficient to run in realtime on one Intel processor. Third section describe the interface and how it raised questions of preset interpolation and multithreading to obtain polyphony. The conclusion draw the contours of what was achieved and outlines possible further studies.