Make Easy Music

Many electronic products, such as games, music synthesizers, and karaoke machines must faithfully reproduce melodious sounds in real time. But designers cannot simply connect an analog output to a speaker and drive it with simple “oscillator” software. Instead, they rely on standard DSP chips and specialized software. In conjunction with Texas Instruments, Lyrtech of Quebec City, Canada, announced its ”Wavetable Sound Synthesis and Multi Format Audio Streaming Solution. The software, which runs on a TI floating-point TMS320C67x–family processor, comes with a hardware reference design.

The Lyrtech design package includes an array of software features that let developers design audio products that provide users with improved performance and reliability.  To ensure rich and realistic instrument sounds for Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) music playback or for MIDI sequencing, the package includes complete and enhanced MIDI synthesizer functions, which can control as many as 128 simultaneous musical “voices.”

Lyrtech’s has based its synthesizer functions on the same proven wave-table synthesis technology already used in many sound cards and music synthesizers. And, the software will simultaneous play back external digital audio, MIDI wave-table, WAV and MP3 files, even though those sources may use different sampling rates. The optimized wave-table synthesizer builds on proven SoundFont technology, so developer can easily balance synthesized sound quality and product cost.

All sound-synthesis, audio-decoding, and effect-processing steps occur on one TI C67x DSP chip, which saves developers circuit-board space and design cost. Additionally, the DSP chip lets developers upgrade SoundFonts as application needs or customer tastes change. The Lyrtech software will operate on the company’s C6727 Pro Audio Development Kit or on its C6713 DSP-based CPA-II development board. Or, Lyrtech can customize the software so it will run on developers’ custom target systems designed around a C67x DSP chip. The Sound Synthesis and Audio Streaming Solution operates with TI's Code Composer Studio integrated development environment (IDE).