On Thursday, December 3rd 2009, at 3pm in room 52.321, Stefan Bilbao from the University of Edinburgh, will give a seminar as an introduction to the Physical Modeling of musical instruments.

Abstract: There are lots of ways of going about designing physical modelling sound synthesis routines; probably the best known are digital waveguides, which are a great match to certain instrument types (1D, nearly linear, nearly dispersionless). Another well-known technique is modal synthesis, which was developed into the Modalys/MOSAIC environment at IRCAM. This talk is devoted to time-domain methods, and in particular, finite difference schemes, which are perhaps unfamiliar to the audio engineer; there are no delay lines, digital filters, Fourier transforms, or banks of oscillators employed! The great things about these methods are their  generality, their fidelity to the physics of musical instruments and that they can be very easy to construct---there are no hypotheses about travelling waves, or linearity, or modal frequencies. The downside is that they may cost more to run, in terms of computational effort, and that there are all sorts of quirky design issues, such as numerical stability, bandwidth limitation and others to contend with! Sound examples, and possibly a piece generated in the Matlab language, will be presented. 

Stefan Bilbao's website