Acoustic Analysis of Musical Instruments

[czechman45]

I'd like to learn more about acoustic analysis of musical instruments, but I have no idea where to even start. I've taken some acoustics courses and some fluid dynamics courses as well as structural vibrations. What I'd like to do is model an instrument and then have a numerically predicted tone and timbre. I know that this has been done at least several times with a guitar model. Is this primarily an FEA problem? Does CFD come into play here? How would I go about doing this and what types of things would I have to learn about?

Thanks for your input!

 

[Bobbywhy]

You may visit these sites to find how others have been doing these analyses:
http://spa.aalto.fi/en/research/acoustics_and_audio_signal_processing_group/
http://www.cirmmt.mcgill.ca/research/axes/Sound_Modeling
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=5337963
http://asadl.org/jasa/resource/1/jasman/v95/i5/p2946_s2?bypassSSO=1

 

[Vanadium 50]

You might want to start with Rossing's book on the subject.

 

[AlephZero]

If you want to understand the physics of an acoustic instrument, then structural and fluid mechanics (both computational an experimental) is a good starting point.

On the other hand if you want to simulate an instrument (real or imagined), especailly if you want to be able to "play" it in real time, you want a strong background in digital signal processing, and there has been a lot of work on producing fast approxmate algorithms that "sound good" even if they are not an accurate detailed model of the physics.

Two more websites:
https://ccrma.stanford.edu/
http://www.phys.unsw.edu.au/music/