Towards Inverse Virtual Analog Modeling

Alberto Bernardini; Augusto Sarti
DAFx-2019 - Birmingham
Several digital signal processing approaches, generally referred to as Virtual Analog (VA) modeling, are currently under development for the software emulation of analog audio circuitry. The main purpose of VA modeling is to faithfully reproduce the behavior of real-world audio gear, e.g., distortion effects, synthesizers or amplifiers, using efficient algorithms. In this paper, however, we provide a preliminary discussion about how VA modeling can be exploited to infer the input signal of an analog audio system, given the output signal and the parameters of the circuit. In particular, we show how an inversion theorem known in circuit theory, and based on nullors, can be used for this purpose. As recent advances in Wave Digital Filter (WDF) theory allow us to implement circuits with nullors in a systematic fashion, WDFs prove to be useful tools for inverse VA modeling. WDF realizations of a nonlinear audio system and its inverse are presented as an example of application.
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