Patent ID: 6169241
Filing Date: 2001-01-02
Classification: G10H

Abstract:
A music apparatus for generating a music tone at a specified pitch while freely contracting and expanding the music tone along a time axis, the music apparatus comprising: a waveform memory that memorizes a music tone in the form of waveform data composed of a sequence of waveform units arranged in cycles along the time axis, each waveform unit having a normalized cycle length; a read address generator that generates a read address which successively increments at a rate corresponding to the specified pitch, thereby reading out the waveform data from the waveform memory according to the read address; a tone generator that processes the read waveform data to generate the music tone at the specified pitch; a virtual address generator that generates a virtual address effective to freely contract and expand the time axis of the waveform data; and an address controller that operates when the read address deviates from the virtual address during the course of generation of the music tone for controlling the read address generator to change the read address by an integer multiple of the normalized cycle length so as to track the virtual address.