Ever since the electronic synthesis of sound began early this century, one of its main goals was to make an electronic instrument sound like an acoustic instrument. It's been a never-ending challenge for synth programmers - expressiveness is especially hard to include into electronics, and that alone has stopped many "serious" musicians from taking any electronic instrument seriously. Great increases in computer power have put us in the line-of-sight with a new technology that may just solve those issues: physical modeling.

For the past 10 years, computer engineers have been working on a technique of sound creation that is based on a physical description of the object that makes the sound: imagine programming your synthesizer to respond like a violin with a certain shape built with a specific kind of wood, with a certain amount of rosin on the bow, and a certain amount of force on the string that is made of a certain material and tuned to a specific pitch. All these are variable parameters, and allow for changes in the sound as it is being played; a responsiveness that is currently unmatched by electronic instruments. As an example, physical models of electric guitars and amplifiers can result in computer-generated guitar feedback that sounds quite realistic!

A few machines have already attempted to utilize this technology: Yamaha introduced the VL-1, which was one of the first complete physical modeling synthesizers available, and as a result, one of the most overpriced. It lacked in a few major areas (polyphony, for one), and was designed for a wind controller instead of a keyboard, thus it didn't catch on too quickly. Roland has recently introduced the V-Drums, and besides using a revolutionary electronic trigger, claims to model the drum sounds from their descriptions - drum shells, sizes, head types, tunings, mufflings, microphone type and placement, amongst others, are all adjustable. Other machines such as the Korg WaveDrum and the Roland VG-8 are based not around keyboards, but drums and guitar for maximization of expressiveness. Are keyboards taking a back seat to other instruments for electronic music? It seems as though it may be necessary in order to maximize the possibilities of physical modeling.

What becomes more exciting about physical modeling is that you could model instruments that couldn't reasonably or physically be built or manufactured. You could play a 10-foot acoustic bass or a 2-inch trumpet and hear it accurately repesented. Though programmers are still struggling with computer power and design parameters, you can bet that in the not-too-distant future physical modeling will bypass FM synthesis, subtractive/additive synthesis, phase distortion synthesis, and even sampling as the electronic sound-creation method of choice. Try this link for further information about Musical Physical Modeling