Simulating Idiomatic Playing Styles in a Classical Guitar Synthesizer: Rasgueado as a Case Study

This paper presents our research efforts to synthesize comp lex instrumental gestures using a score-based control scheme. Ou r specific goal is to simulate the rasgueado technique that is popu lar especially in flamenco music. This technique is also used in the classical guitar repertoire. Rasgueado is especially challeng ing as ordinary music notation is not adequate to represent the dense stream of notes required for a convincing simulation. We will take t wo approaches to realize our task. First, we use the practical k nowledge of how the actual performance is accomplished by the hum an player. A second, complementary, approach is to analyze an e xcerpt from real guitar playing. Our main focus here is to extr act the onset times and the amplitudes of the recoded gesture. Ne xt we combine the results from the two analysis steps using a const rai tbased approach to find possible pitch and fingering sequences . Finally we translate the findings to our macro-note scheme that allows us to fill algorithmically a musical score.