Simulating musical instruments using their impulse responses
Daniel D. Sleator · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1985
A function of the wooden box of a stringed musical instrument is to couple the vibrations of the string to the air, while filtering these vibrations to improve the sound. If we assume that this is all the box does, and that the box behaves linearly, then we can completely characterize its effect (at a fixed point in space) by an impulse response. An interesting question is whether or not the information necessary to capture the musical characteristics of the box of an instrument is really in the impulse response. I measured the impulse responses of some violins, violas, and cellos by damping the strings, tapping the bridge, and recording the resulting sounds. These were then convolved with digitized measurements of vibrations of bowed violin strings. Blind experiments indicate that most people familiar with the sounds of actual instruments can easily tell which sounds “came” from which instruments. I am developing efficient ways of computing these convolutions so that they can be done cheaply in real time. The applications include making more realistic electric violins, making portable electric cellos, and improving the synthesis of stringed instrument sounds.