Even when special-purpose DSP hardware is used, it often lacks the functionality required for efficient execution of music synthesis algorithms. We believe it is important to identify architectural features which are unique and important to music synthesis, with the hope that such features will be incorporated into future DSP designs. For complex video and image processing applications, special-purpose hardware is an accepted requirement. The special hardware may be anything from a hardware synthesizer to a general- purpose DSP system. We are interested in DSP requirements for music synthesis.
Music synthesis is different from other audio signal processing problems.
For example, in most audio signal processing the goal is to synthesize a signal which is as close as possible to some original. The problem might be to efficiently compress and then resynthesize an audio signal, or to remove noise from a corrupted audio signal. Today s DSP chips are made with special instructions for efficient implementation of operations important in audio signal processing. The FFT and filter capabilities designed into DSPs are an important part of music synthesis. Other operations are not implemented in useful ways for music synthesis.