Guitar Additive Sinthesys
Harmonic and Inharmonic Analysis
Carlos Eduardo Romero
University of Extremadura
Polytechenic School
Cáceres, Spain
Carlos_r93@hotmail.es
Abstract-This report corresponds to the first evaluable
practice of the class Digital Audio, in this practice we have
simulated additive digital synthesis of a guitar using Matlab
software, also it has been studied the harmonic and inharmonic
behavior of this instrument.
Keywords— FFT; Harmonic; Inharmonic; Partials; Octave;
additive; Sinthesys; Sound; Guitar.
I. INTRODUCTION
First of all we have selected the range of the notes to be
produced with our Matlab program, the note of La in the
fourth octave was selected as reference, the program will be
able to play sounds in a range of three octaves except for the
Mi note that will be play in fourth octaves, this means a total
of 37 different sounds will be synthesized, it has been set three
different sound duration: one second, half of second, and
quarter of a second, also the reader will find in this report how
we extracted the information of the guitar´s partials.
II. PHYSICAL ASPECTCS OF THE GUITAR
[1] The guitar is a musical instrument classified as a string
instrument with anywhere from four to 18 strings, usually
having six. The sound is projected either acoustically, using a
hollow wooden or plastic and wood box (for an acoustic
guitar), it is typically played by strumming or plucking the
strings with the fingers, thumb and/or fingernails of the right
hand or with a pick while fretting (or pressing against
the frets) the strings with the fingers of the left hand. The
guitar is a type of chordophone.
Fig 1. Parts of a Guitar
Javier Fernández Retortillo
University of Extremadura
Polytechenic School
Cáceres, España
Javi_992@hotmail.com
A. Head
The headstock is located at the end of the guitar neck
farthest from the body. It is fitted with machine heads that
adjust the tension of the strings, which in turn affects the pitch.
B. Body
In acoustic guitars, string vibration is transmitted through
the bridge and saddle to the body via sound board. The sound
board is typically made of tone woods such as spruce or cedar.
Timbers for tone woods are chosen for both strength and
ability to transfer mechanical energy from the strings to the air
within the guitar body. Sound is further shaped by the
characteristics of the guitar body's resonant cavity.
C. Neck
A guitar's frets, fretboard, tuners, headstock, and truss rod,
all attached to a long wooden extension, collectively constitute
its neck, is important to the guitar's ability to hold a constant
pitch during tuning or when strings are fretted. The rigidity of
the neck with respect to the body of the guitar is one
determinant of a good instrument versus a poor one.
D. Chords
The enumeration of guitar chords are made from top to
bottom according to the most low pitched to the most high
pitched sound. The fourth, fifth and sixth being the chord the
produces the most low pitched sound.
 First guitar string corresponds to Mi note.
 Second guitar string corresponds to Si note.
 Third guitar string corresponds to Sol note.
 Fourth guitar string corresponds to Re note.
 Fifth guitar string corresponds to La note.
 Sixth guitar string corresponds to Mi note.
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 III. HARMONICS AND INHARMONICS
[2]Harmonics are an important part of every note, every
time that a guitar chord is play it starts to vibrate according to
a complicate pattern and the sound that produces it is
compound of many elements, fundamental frequency is the
main and louder component of the sound and the one that
stands out, and also is the one which the tonality of the note is
identify. Also fundamental frequency can be define as the
sound produced when the chord vibrates in only one
wavelength.
As we can observe in Fig 2. The chord produces a series of
harmonics o partials that are multiples of the fundamental
frequency, and they are produced because the chord vibrates
in the same time at short- wavelengths.
Fig 2. Harmonics of a Fundamental Frequency
[3] Inharmonicity is a phenomenon that has place in the
musical instrument, this effect produces the deviation of the
frequencies of the different partial sounds according each one
of them and also depending the fundamental frequency. For
example, an inharmonicity is produced when the second
harmonic of La with 440 Hz of fundamental frequency instead
of having a frequency of 880 Hz has a frequency of 880.4 Hz.
[4] In other words inharmonicity is the deviation in the
frequency of the harmonics of a chord respecting its expected
theoretical values, that is produced because the stiffness of the
chord, and this stiffness makes harmonics don’t swing in their
exact nodes but one that are a little deviated. Inside the same
chord, the deviation mentioned above no necessary appears in
continues way, that means some harmonics ( they are called
partials when they are deviated of their theoretical values) are
deviated in positive way and others in negative way; in string
instruments, inharmonicity is directly related with the
thickness, stiffness and length of the chord.
A. Mathematical Analysis of Inharmonics
Guitar´s Inharmonicity main variables are: length of the
scale, tunning and chord´s caliber, [5] when relating the
inharmonicity to the actual frequency of the stretched
fundamental f1 rather than to the frequency of the ideal string,
fn is given approximately by.
It is sometimes convenient to express the deviation of the
partial frequencies from a harmonic series by numbers of cents
(100 cents= 1 semitone). The inharmonicity In, which
expresses the ratio fn/(n*f1), is given by:
Where b = 866B is the inharmonicity coefficient in cents.
In these lines we can see that inharmonicity for a specific
harmonic ( In where n is the harmonic number) is directly
proportional to B where B is the inharmonicity coefficient. As
we see making the corresponding simplifications it leads to the
conclusion that inharmonicity is approximately equal to bn^2.
Another approximation for inharmonics was realized for
the professor Jim B. of the Illinois at Urbana i-champaign
University, where making all the assumptions and
simplifications it leads to the following equation:
Where,
r is string radius, E is Young`s modulus, T is tension and L is
string length.
As we see, it is set that inharmonicity (f[n]) is directly
proportional to A, also A is directly proportional to r and
inversely proportional to T and L. where r is the radius , T is
tension and L is length. Say in other words, bigger the
thickness bigger the inharmonicity and bigger the tension or
bigger the length lower the inharmonicity.
We are interested that our guitar has the thinnest chord and
the biggest tension possible. Obviously there are physics
limits for our hands, also using big scales and calibers will
convert our guitar in a bass.
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 IV. SOUND SYNTHESIS
TABLE I. OCTAVE INDEX ACCORDING THE REFERENCE OF LA4
Sound synthesis is the main objective of this practice, and
consists in to be able to produce artificial sounds for non -
acoustical ways that approximate to the original ones. Oct 3 Oct 4 Oct 5 Oct 6
Do -9 3 15
Do# -8 4 16
Re -7 5 17
Re# -6 6 18
Mi -17 -5 7 19
Fa -16 -4 8
Fa# -15 -3 9
Sol -14 -2 10
Sol# -13 -1 11
La -12 0 12
La# -11 1 13
Si -10 2 14

Also in Table I we can see that we have take as reference

Fig 3. Additve Sinthesys Scheme.
In the Fig 3 we can observe the scheme of the kind of
synthesis used in this practice, in our case we implemented
additive synthesis that is an digital synthesis (it means we
synthesized sounds programming a computer) and consists in
the overlap of different kind of waves with different
amplitudes and this allow us to reproduce the sound of
interest.
Applying this technique to the guitar´s note generation we
can see in Fig 3 that for reproduce the sound of each note we
need mainly two parameters:
 The different frequencies of the partials used per
note.
 The different amplitudes of these partials.
A. Guitar´s Range of Notes
In this section we present the range of octaves that our
Matlab program is able to reproduce. Musical register of a
guitar only achieves three octaves. The frequency range
produce for the vibration of the guitar´s chords goes from Mi3
to Mi6.
As we can see in Table I all notes has a range of three
octaves except Mi note, in which we have decided to include
Mi6 because is a sound that the guitar is able to achieve, so
our program will be prepared to synthetized 37 different
sounds.
note La in the fourth octave that corresponds to a frequency of
440 Hz. Each index of the table corresponds to the frequency
position respect to the reference note La4.
(5)
Equation (5) presents the relation of the frequency of any
note to the reference note. For example using n=-2 and
Fref=440 we have the corresponding frequency to Sol in the
fourth octave.
B. Guitar´s Spectral Information
As detailed above to be able to reproduce adequately the
guitar´s sound we need spectral information of each one of the
37 notes that will be synthesized. To be able to obtain this
information of the partials we used real guitar samples
obtained through an audio edition software. These samples
were not taken for us because we do not have neither a guitar
nor a MIDI port, but in [6] it is detailed where these samples
were took.
We decided to do it in this way because is a more precise
way to assing these values to the different amplitudes of each
partial, so in this way we have different spectral information
for each one of the 37 sounds that will be recreated. The other
option was to suppose that every note had the same behavior
in all the three octaves but this is not true, in the used samples
we can observe that different octave for the same note leads to
different partials amplitude.

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 We decided to use the fundamental frequency and fourteen
partials for each note, so in this way we have an array of
fifteen position for each one of the 37 notes.
This array that has the spectrum amplitudes has the form
of :
Equation (7) it is the nyquist theorem and it says that our
sampling frequency has to be at least two times the highest
frequency that our program will generate; our highest
frequency corresponds to Mi6 that is calculated with n=19
and corresponds to a frequency of 1318.5 Hz, so our sampling
frequency has to be at least 2637 Hz.

[0.5f f 1.5f 2f 2.5f 3f 3.5f 4f 4.5f 5f 5.5f 6f 6.5f 7f 7.5f] Because of that we decided to use a sampling frequency of
8000 Hz cause is necessary work with a standard frequency
and 8000 Hz is the closest to the ours.

 D. Surrounding
In the equation (6) we have the relation between the
fundamental frequency and the fourteen used partials. [7] in
low pitched sound notes there will be empty positions of the
array because it will have a reduced number of harmonics but
in high pitched sound notes there will be even more that
fifteen harmonics, so for this reason we it is decided that the
array has a sufficient number of position to be able to simulate
the sound in an more accurate way.
Table II shows the spectral information used in our sixth
octave synthesis.
[8] Surrounding is the name of the time development of a
specific sound and it is compound of:
 Attack: is the time between the starts of the sound
and the time the it takes to achieve the maximum
amplitude, attack is denominated as transition
because it has very short time duration.
 Decay: is the time that it takes to reduce the
amplitude from the maximum value to the sustain
value.

TABLE II. SIXTH OCTAVE PARTIAL AMPLITUDES  Sustain: in this time the sound keeps constant until it
stops to introduce vibration in the instrument.
Do6 Do#6 Re6 Re#6 Mi6
f/2 0.0121 0.0085 0.0116 0.0190 0.0095  Release: is the time that it takes to the sound in
f 0.0140 0.0074 0.0121 0.0016 0.0042 reduce its amplitude until it can not be heard
anymore, after the vibration has stop.
3f/2 0.0016 0.0007 0.0004 0.0037 0.0059
2f 0.0088 0.0008 0.0182 0.0051 0.0088
5f/2 0.0072 0.0012 0.0020 0.0017 0.0008 Surrounding is a very important characteristic of the
3f 0.0004 0.0006 0.0022 0.0002 0.0012 sound because with the harmonics conforms the timbre of the
7f/2 0.0002 0.0006 0.0007 0.0034 0.0053 sound that allow to differentiate one sound of others.
4f 0.0011 0.0002 0.0014 0.0038 0.0021
In other words surrounding allow us for example
9f/2 0.0019 0.0025 0.0013 0.0008 0.0008 differentiate a piano from a guitar or human voice from a
5f 0.0021 0.0016 0.0030 0.0027 0.0002 trombone.
11f/2 0.0011 0.0004 0.0013 0.0009 0.0004
6f 0.0009 0.0018 0.0025 0.0003 0.0005 In our synthesis we have decided to use an exponential
surrounding for each note generated, we decided this because
13f/2 0.0006 0.0004 0.0036 0.0001 0.0003
we thought that it was a good compromise between the
7f 0.0004 0 0.0007 0.0001 0.0001 accurate timbre achieves and the complexity of our
15f/2 0.0004 0.0001 0.0002 0.0002 0.0001 programming code.

C. Sampling Frequency Used

Once we have explained the spectral analysis that we used

for our program, now we have to specify an adequate
sampling frequency, this frequency will be necessary for
sound synthesis.

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 As we can observe in equation (8) this surrounding has a
decay slope given for the maximum sample of the synthesized
note Fig.4 shows an example of this surrounding for a one
second note duration.

Fig 6. FFT of Sol3 Generated with Additve Synthesis (red) and FFT of Sol3
Generated with an Online Synthesizer (blue).

Fig 4. Exponential Surrouding with one Second of Duration
E. Spectrum Comparison
Fig 5 shows the spectrum of Sol in the third octave, we
obtained the expected results, it can be seen how the highest
delta corresponds to the fundamental frequency and it is
according to the theoretical expected value of 196 Hz.
V. CONCLUSIONS
When we executed our program we were able to hear that
before surrounding was added to the note, this generate note
sounds like a pure and constant tone, but when we applied the
exponential surrounding to the note it can be perceive a better
accurate with the real sound timbre. But despite of that we do
not achieve to reproduce the characteristic sound of a guitar,
this is because in additive synthesis is very important to use
different surroundings that will handle the different partial
amplitudes.
REFERENCES

[1] wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guitar.

[2] http://www.guitarmonia.es/teoria-musical/armonico/
[3] https://guitarbend.com/132-lutheria-fisica-de-
guitarra/719-teoria-de-cuerdas-1-inarmonicidad-longitud-
de-escala-calibre-de-cuerdas-por-que-es-mejor-una-
guitarra-multi-escala.html.
[4] https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inarmon%C3%ADa
[5] https://guitarbend.com/132-lutheria-fisica-de-
guitarra/796-teoria-de-cuerdas-2-inarmonicidad-longitud-
de-escala-calibre-de-cuerdas-por-que-es-mejor-una-
guitarra-multi-escala.html.
[6] Francisco José Molina García. (2010). Desarrollo de una
Fig 5. FFT of Sol3 Generated with Additve Synthesis
aplicación de secuenciado MIDI en MatLab. 1/10/2016,
de Universidad de Valencia Sitio web:
https://riunet.upv.es/bitstream/handle/10251/9525/memori
a.pdf
[7] Francisco José Molina García. (2010). Desarrollo de una
Also in Fig 6 it can be observed a comparative between aplicación de secuenciado MIDI en MatLab. 1/10/2016,
Sol in the third octave FFT synthesized for our additive de Universidad de Valencia Sitio web:
https://riunet.upv.es/bitstream/handle/10251/9525/memori
synthesis Matlab program and Sol in the third octave a.pdf
synthesized for an online synthesizer that we found in [9]. [8] http://blog.7notasestudio.com/guia-compresion-ataque-y-
release/
[9] http://www.freeecardgreeting.net/home/acoustic_guitar_o
nline_spanish.php

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