Collisions in Musical Instruments: a Numerical Modelling Perspective

Van Walstijn, M. (Keynote speaker)

Activity: Talk or presentation types › Invited or keynote talk at national or international conference

Description

Keynote Talk

Period	21 Jun 2017
Event title	The 2017 International Symposium on Musical Acoustics
Event type	Conference
Location	Montreal, CanadaShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International

Documents & Links

The vibrational behaviour of musical instruments often involves some form of collision. The nature of the contact can vary from compact in both space and time, as with hammer-string interaction, to more distributed and sustained forms, such as string-membrane collisions in a snare drum. The former can usually be modelled in lumped form, suppressing the computation of the interaction forces to a single point, whereas the latter requires considering variations along spatial coordinates. In most cases, the impactive interaction represents an important nonlinear element that is closely linked to the characteristics and/or the gestural control of the instrument. Given the non-smooth nature of collision forces, incorporating such phenomena into time-stepping simulations can be challenging due to potential instability and further issues around computability, accuracy and efficiency. Approaches to address these challenges are discussed in this talk, starting from considering collision between a single mass colliding with a barrier and culminating in the simulation of full distributed interaction between a nonlinearly vibrating string and a barrier of arbitrary spatial profile. The presented numerical methods can serve as a basis or tool for time-domain study and sound synthesis of a range of stringed instruments. Specific attention will be given to so-called flat-bridge instruments such as the sitar and the tanpura, which produce spectrally rich drone sounds through sustained impactive string-bridge interaction.
https://isma2017.cirmmt.mcgill.ca/proceedings/pdf/ISMA_2017_Keynote_Slides_vanWalstijn.pdf