Rhythmic concatenative synthesis for electronic music: techniques, implementation, and evaluation

Abstract

In this article, we summarize recent research examining concatenative synthesis and its application and relevance in the composition and production of styles of electronic dance music. We introduce the conceptual underpinnings of concatenative synthesis and describe key works and systematic approaches in the literature. Our system, RhythmCAT, is proposed as a user-friendly system for generating rhythmic loops that model the timbre and rhythm of an initial target loop. The architecture of the system is explained, and an extensive evaluation of the system’s performance and user response is discussed based on our results.