Creating Virtual Acoustic Replicas of Real Violins

Esteban Maestrea and Gary Scavoneb

aMcGill University
bComputational acoustic modeling laboratory, CIRMMT, McGill University

Monday, September 16, 2019 from 15:20 to 15:40

in Summer Theater

Abstract :
In the context of preserving historical musical instruments as interactive digital acoustic artifacts that can be played and heard in real time, we provide an overview of our recent progress on measuring, modeling, and virtually recreating the sound radiation characteristics of real acoustic violins. Our approach is based on measuring the directivity of an acoustic violin and constructing an efficient digital filter model that can be used for real-time processing of a whitened version of the electrical signal coming from a silent violin as played by a musician. In a low reverberation chamber, we use a microphone array to characterize the radiativity transfer function of a real violin by exciting the bridge with an impact hammer and measuring the acoustic pressure at 4320 points on a sphere surrounding the instrument. From the real violin measurements, we design a mutable state-space digital filter that allows to obtain the sound pressure radiated in any direction. We characterize the silent violin transfer function by exciting the bridge with an impact hammer and measuring the electrical signal at its output. From the silent violin measurement, we design a recursive parallel filter that allows to whiten the electrical signal and digitally recover the force signal.

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