Musical tone reproducing apparatus and portable terminal apparatus

Abstract

There is provided a musical tone reproducing apparatus, which stores tone color parameters in a general-purpose storage means, to thereby shorten the time taken for a tone color changing process. A CPUregisters a tone color parameter group that has been read out from a RAMin a tone generator memory, which is a general-purpose memory, in advance. The tone color parameters required when a tone generation corecarries out musical tone reproduction are stored in a cache memoryfor all channels. Upon the CPUgiving a tone color changing command to a controller, a specified tone color parameter is read out from the tone generator memory. The tone color parameter for a specified channel in the cache memoryis then rewritten with the read out tone color parameter. The tone generation corereads out from the cache memorythe rewritten tone color parameter set for each channel, and hence musical tone reproduction with a changed tone color is carried out. Because a tone color parameter group of a freely chosen number of tone color parameters has been registered in the tone generator memory, the need to transfer a tone color parameter from the CPUto the tone generator memoryeach time a tone color is to be changed can be removed as much as possible. Moreover, the output bit width of the cache memoryis made to be large, and hence the tone color parameter the tone color parameter can be set into the tone generator means instantaneously. Consequently, even though the tone color parameters are stored in advance in the general-purpose storage means, the time taken for the tone color changing process can be shortened, and hence the occurrence of a break in sound generation during tone color changing can be prevented.