Posted April 17, 2012 by Chris

“Our project is a velocity sensitive hardware based piano. We simulated two strings per note using a Karplus Strong algorithm written in Verilog, and coupled it with a Casio electric piano keyboard fitted with custom switches to act as a user interface. On an Altera DE2 board we built a hardware Karplus-Strong synthesizer to simulate a piano key with two strings, along with a hardware timer. The timer was used to determine the key push’s velocity, which in turn affected the volume level of the synthesized sound.”