1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an electronic musical instrument which is suitable for synthesizing a desirable musical tone by combining plural sounds.
2. Prior Art
Recently, there are developed several kinds of electronic musical instruments each of which activates a simulation model of a tone-generation mechanism of a non-electronic musical instrument so as to synthesize its musical tone. Such music synthesis technique is disclosed in the papers such as U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,984,276 and 4,130,043. Herein, there is disclosed an electronic musical instrument which simulates a tone-generation mechanism of the wind instrument such as the clarinet. In addition, the above-mentioned papers also disclose about the electronic musical instruments which simulate tone-generation mechanisms of the string-plucking-type instrument such as the guitar and string-striking-type instrument such as the piano.
Meanwhile, currently produced electronic musical instrument may provide plural FM sound sources called "operators". By arbitrarily combining some of these operators, a desirable musical tone is to be synthesized. In addition, the above-mentioned electronic musical instrument provides a liquid crystal display (i.e., "LCD") which displays the combining state or connecting manner of these operators. This combining state of the operators is called "algorithm" which is an important element for determining the tone color of the musical tone to be generated. By use of this algorithm, the user of this electronic musical instrument can acknowledge the physical combination of the sound sources. Therefore, by changing the contents of this algorithm, it is possible to carry out the sound synthesis or sound composition with ease.
When applying the above-mentioned function to the conventional electronic musical instrument which simulates the tone-generation mechanism of the non-electronic musical instrument, it is possible to carry out the varied sound synthesis by arbitrarily combining some of the tone-generation mechanisms of the non-electronic musical instruments. However, when using the different musical instrument to be simulated, such electronic musical instrument must require completely different tone-generation algorithm or its operation parameters. For this reason, when carrying out the sound synthesis by freely using several kinds of the tone-generation mechanisms, it is required for the user to have the expert knowledge concerning the tone-generation mechanism of the instrument itself to be simulated. This is difficult for the non-professional user who does not have the expert knowledge about the musical instrument, because such user cannot figure out the setting manner of the algorithm or operation parameters. Thus, there is a problem in that the sound synthesis is very difficult for the users.