Abstract

The face of music has been drastically evolving over the past century starting with the advent of the electric guitar. The emergence of digital signal processing in guitar audio applications has constantly been driven by the ability to diversify tonalities from experimenting with instrument materials, pick-ups, amplifiers, and effects. This paper demonstrates an alternative approach to guitar effects by using FPGA implementation, in lieu of DSP cores or analog components, to perform digital signal processing intended for alteration of guitar audio signals. The audio processing of the multiple effects were developed on a Zedboard incorporated with a Xilinx Zynq®-7000 SOC which utilizes programmable logic fabric as well as dual ARM-A9 processors. The different guitar effects were derived from custom IP blocks written in a mixtures of Verilog and VHDL in the programmable logic (PL) are controlled with rotary potentiometers and switches on custom guitar effect pedals that connect to the processor system (PS) via an I2C bus. The overall design serves to offer an alternative solution to traditional guitar pedals which perform the signal processing with lower latency while eliminating numerous patch cables, power cables, and overall costly pedals.

Publication Date

5-2020

Document Type

Master's Project

Student Type

Graduate

Degree Name

Electrical Engineering (MS)

Department, Program, or Center

Electrical Engineering (KGCOE)

Advisor

Mark A. Indovina

Advisor/Committee Member

Sohail A. Dianat

Campus

RIT – Main Campus

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