Turbonius R&D
Abstract :
The musical instruments manufacturing requires several project
demands related to the instrument structural capacity and to the
desired aesthetic and sound attributes. Although technologies to
support these projects have been available for at least two decades,
most of what has been done is the empirical reproduction of
consolidated models, which hinders innovations since it is often based
on trial and error methods. Computational tools, therefore, are useful
because they may provide a certain prediction level of the instrument
structural behavior and its sound, leading to time and costs reduction
in the instrument project. In this context, the Urutau project is
emerging as a computational enviroment for assisting musical
instrument manufacturers. This work presents a preliminary
architecture of the Urutau enviroment as well as an objective
validation study of its simulation tools. Initially, a simplified
monochord is built and its corresponding CAD model is obtained. A
finite element modal analysis is then performed and results are
compared with experimental data. A physical modelling based on a
modal approach associated with a finite-difference solution is used to
generate a set of monochord synthesized sounds which are compared
objectively to real sounds.