La soutenance de thèse se déroule devant un jury composé de :

Xavier Serra - professeur, Music Technology Group, Université Pompeu Fabra, Espagne
Sylvain Marchand - professeur, Image et son, Unviversité Bretagne, Brest
Vesa Välimäki - professeur, Université Aalto, dot of Signal Processing ans Acoustics, Finlande
David Bertrand - chercheur, Télécom Paris ENST
Jean-Luc Zarader - professeur, UPMC Isir
Axel Roebel - directeur de thèse, chercheur, IRCAM

A method for imitative sound synthesis applicable to most quasi-harmonic instruments will be presented.

The approach bases upon single-note recordings that represent a quantized version of an instrument’s possible timbre space with respect to its pitch and intensity dimension.
A transformation method then allows to render sound signals with continuous values of the expressive control parameters pitch and intensity which are perceptually coherent with its acoustic equivalents.

The thesis introduces:

• A parametric instrument model based on an extended source-filter model with separate representations of a signal’s harmonic and residual signal components to allow for their individual manipulations.

• A method for the estimation of the relative level differences with regard to varying values of the global note intensity values to enable the calibration of the instrument model for acoustically coherent volume variations.

• A subjective evaluation method for the assessment of the perceptual coherence of the synthesis method with unmodified recordings of an instrument.