Formant like?

[Martin Czech]

As far as I know, formants do not only occur in voice synthesis (either natural
or synthetic) but also in EVERY mechanical instrument. In fact, the whole 
instrument body thing (violin body, or guitar resonance body) is a complicated
resonator and provides substantial strong formants. These formants define very
much the quality of sound (compare solid body guitar with a classical one,
they both have strings but sound very different -accousticaly played-).
That's what all instrument makers are struggling for since ever.
In the second book of the Formant Synth there is a compilation of classical
instruments and their main formants, because the RFM-Module is in this
edition of course. 
It is doubtfull however, if three simple 2nd order bandpass filters are suitable
for emulation of such formants, since a resonance plane, like a piece of wood
or a drum will behave more like a delay-line resonator, with several equidistant
peaks and notches. This approach is covered in the Waveguide-Theory (I think)
and sucessfully implemented in Yamaha's Virtuall Accoustic Instruments VL etc.
I think this was first used in Karplus-Strong type synthesis:
Do this at home:
Use a delay line with lots of feedback and some lowpass-filter as resonator,
and pulsed noise or just pulses as trigger. Sounds like a plucked string instrument.
Delay controls pitch, feedback  controls release, lowpass freq.  controls
"brightness" (1st order explanation).


m.c.