ASA 129th Meeting - Washington, DC - 1995 May 30 .. Jun 06

2aMU1. Musical oscillator simulations: From curiosity-driven science to commercial product.

Robert T. Schumacher

Dept. of Phys., Carnegie Mellon Univ., Pittsburgh, PA 15213

The first computer simulations of bowed string oscillations were done by McIntyre and Woodhouse in 1977. Generalizations to wind instruments followed within five years. The first commercial product using the principles of these simulations appeared in 1994. This talk will give a brief history of these developments, and will then concentrate on recent work on computer simulation of bowed string motion, much of which is presented in detail by other papers in this and an associated session. the relative success of bowed string simulations compared to simulations of wind instrument oscillations requires some explanation, which will be provided. The talk will conclude with a summary of the recent work by the author with James Woodhouse using fast computation to explore the enormous parameter space of the string instrumentalists' world.