Consultation des notices

Based on physical models of musical instruments and of the human voice, a new generation of sound syntesizers is born: virtual instruments. The models used for wind-instruments are simple feedback loops in uhich a non-linear sound source drives a linear,filter representing the pipe of the instrument. While very rewarding musical sounds have been obtained with these models, it has become obvious that some essential phenomena escape such a description. In particular the brightness of the sound generated by trombones is expected to be due to the essential non-linearity of the wave propagation in the pipe. At fortissimo levels this leads to shock wave formation observed in our experiments both from pressure measurements and flow visualization. A modest modification of the physical model could already take this phenomenon into account. The key idea is that the non-linear effect is essential for the transfer of sound from the source towards the listener, but can be ignored in a model of the generation of the pipe oscillations.