The Flexible Sound Synthesizer on an FPGA

Digital synthesizers have laid the groundwork for the significant advances in sound computing devices and they have been spreading worldwide. Currently, to perform live music through mobile computing devices, higher-quality and higher-speed sound computation are in vital demand. But these demands have not been implemented due to the devices' scarce computational power. To successfully play symphonies using mobile devices, this paper proposes the flexible sound synthesizer which includes the programmability of internal modules. First, the paper proposes to design the high-quality basic modules which consider the amount of circuits for the parallel computation on an FPGA. These modules adopt the CORDIC methods thus enable smaller-sized FPGA to hold many modules. Then, we verified the modules from the viewpoint of sound quality and circuit size. Finally, the graphical user interface was introduced to design the original synthesizer.