The NESS Project

Welcome to the companion website for the NESS project (standing for Next Generation Sound Synthesis), funded through a Starting Grant from the European Research Council for five years beginning on January 1, 2012. This is an exploratory project, concerned entirely with synthetic sound—and in particular, numerical simulation techniques for physical modelling sound synthesis in parallel hardware. It is a joint project between the Acoustics and Audio Group and the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre, both at the University of Edinburgh.

This site is designed to be non-technical, and to give you a flavour of what it is we do, from the algorithm designs to the implementation to the musical pieces which have been created using these tools. Have fun. If you’re impatient, have a look at the short accompanying video instead!