Workgroup-Description
During many decades not to say centuries much work has been done by many excellent scientists and research teams all over the world to model the action of musical instruments and the human voice in order to better understand the governing physical principles and to develop a basic theory of operation.
The quickly developing computer power of this age helped a lot to validate those models and many attempts have been made to write computer programs based on discretized versions of such physical models in order to obtain simulations of virtual instruments, either to calculate their sound or to derive other acoustical characteristics sensed by musicians as playability, intonation, sustain, response or timbre.
Today we know many different models for basic acoustical building blocks in the time as well as in the frequency domain. Each of them is valid under certain boundary conditions and has been optimised for a specific purpose. All these models have strengths and weaknesses and most of them have been implemented in various computer languages.
Modelling more sophisticated acoustical systems composed from basic building blocks, it has already been recognised that combining different modelling paradigms can yield more efficient programs or more accurate and stable results. And as most of the existing models are based on the wave equation it should be possible to solve existing interface problems.
Even time and frequency domain processing is similar enough to think of a most general frame work, which can accept models of any kind and which allows easy transitions between different simulation domains as well as between different modelling paradigms at run time. Once an acoustical system is described in terms of geometry and boundary conditions, it should be possible to do real time sound synthesis using simplified models just as somewhat slower but accurate and realistic sound synthesis or frequency domain analysis without having to re-specify any input.
What is the purpose of this WG?
This work group has been initiated with four main goals in mind:
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First, to collect and concentrate existing knowledge in acoustic modelling, systematically and with strong emphasis on practical aspects and implementation details.
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Second, to initiate research on models which are still missing or have to be improved or which have not been implemented successfully in the past. Further to initiate research to validate models by experiments.
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Third, to develop some most general frame work which is able to resolve existing and possibly even future interface issues so that existing and future models can be combined in a flexible way to specify and simulate sophisticated acoustical systems.
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Fourth, to deal with educational aspects and to create a simulation front end for visualising simulation results as a kind of feedback for singers and players of musical instruments.
Who is to join this WG?
Acousticians, physicists, musicians, computer programmers, digital signal processing specialists, virtual sound engineers, instrument makers who need certain modelling capabilities or simulation tools, biologists working on parts of the speech and singing system, speech therapists and singing teachers studying articulation and phonation.
Please indicate your interest even if you do not intend to contribute. Join the working group if you want to get status reports or to stay informed about ongoing and planned activities. Join and specify your experiences and expertise even if you are too busy to contribute regularly. You might be asked for advice at some point and you might want to briefly comment on some open issue.
How to join this WG?
The working group will mainly communicate electronically. It might organise a work group meeting in 2006 if this turns out to be advisable. The work group might organise a structured session at the next ICA or ISMA.
To join and participate please contact:
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Malte Kob (mkob@european-acoustics.org) |
Wilfried Kausel (kausel@mdw.ac.at) |
