Every musical sound results from a source plus a filtering modifier

Evidence

In Chapter 4 we saw that all musical instruments, including the human voice, could be modeled as a sound source followed by sound modifiers, which apply a filtering function. In the limit the source may be regular spaced impulses, for pitched instruments, a single pulse for percussion instruments, random noise for fricatives, or a combination of them all. A filter that combines the effect of the source with the acoustic effect of the instrument and output to shape the final sound then follows this. The effect of this filtering is to add correlation to the audio signal. Correlation implies that information from previous samples is carried over to the current sample, as shown in Figure 7.34. — David Howard, Jamie Angus, coustics and Psychoacoustics, 2592

Categorization

• DEFINE: Gives the source-filter model as the canonical framework for any instrument or voice.
• XREF: Echoes the earlier chapter’s source/modifier model and underlies later synthesis and coding discussion. — connects to: Every acoustic instrument reduces to a source feeding a modifier that yields an output — David M. Howard, Jamie Angus, Acoustics and Psychoacoustics, 1056