Physical Description of Musical Instruments

Abstract

For the discussion of physical modeling methods used in chapters 4 to 6 for the simulation of acoustical instruments, a physical description of these instruments has to be derived first. Therefore, in this chapter musical instruments are briefly described with respect to their physical behaviour. Instrument families are discussed on one example, extensions to similar instruments are mentioned. First of all, section 1 presents the general notation used for the vibrational description of musical instruments. Then section 2 shows that a musical instrument can be subdivided with some simplifications into vibration generators and a resonant body. This is important for the synthesis algorithms described in chapters 4 and 5, because the separation allows a modular realization of the different parts of musical instruments.